Why Perfectionism Is a Trap

Better Than Perfect: How to Be Excellent

Excellent is not the same as perfect and knowing the difference could save your mental health.

By Arash Emamzadeh

Steve Jobs, James Cameron, stanley kubrick, and Martha Stewart are among the people who have either claimed to be or have been labeled perfectionists. To grasp the risks of perfectionism, it’s important to understand what it means. Is it a striving for excellence, or something more problematic? A recent study by researchers at the University of Ottawa drilled down into some important differences between perfectionism and what we could call excellencism.

Perfectionism can be defined as setting, working toward, and becoming preoccupied with idealized goals that are unrealistically ambitious. Perfectionists tend to develop such high expectations of themselves that they can become harshly self-critical. Excellencism, on the other hand, could be defined as a tendency to strive toward high yet attainable standards in a determined yet flexible way. For the former, excellence is just a point on the (unrealistic) path toward perfection; for the latter, it’s the goal.

The University of Ottawa team found that perfectionism and excellencism are distinct concepts with distinct effects on mental health and well-being. Excellencism had a positive association with academic improvement and future achievement, while perfectionism was linked to a decline in achievement. Excellencism also correlated with higher life satisfaction and lower depression as well as greater progress toward one’s goals.

Perfectionists can be highly self-critical, with too little self-compassion and too much self-doubt. So is it better to abandon the quest for achievement? No, but as these studies show, excellencism is a healthier, more adaptive approach. Those who pursue excellence strive to produce high-quality work and accomplish great things—but perfection is never their ultimate goal.

Aiming for excellence is about being efficient. You can invest less time and effort but may achieve similar or greater success than a perfectionist—success that can create more opportunities and, in turn, greater life satisfaction. Perfect may be the enemy of good, but excellence may be the cure for perfect.

Arash Emamzadeh is a writer and poet who has done graduate work in clinical psychology and neuropsychology.

Greg Miller/Redux Pictures

“You’re Not A Robot”

“In high school, I was a competitive swimmer, training 15 to 20 hours a week in addition to maxing out on extracurriculars and taking AP classes. I would actually do a brain dump of my day every night to see where I was losing time,” says Natalie Chernysh, who graduated from Brown University last spring. “If the pandemic hadn’t put a halt to it, I probably would have burned out catastrophically. I started to explore mindfulness during that time and realized I hadn’t been present for most of my life, and that felt quite sad. But in college I reverted back to those habits. I was able to achieve a lot, but at the end of every semester, I basically burned out, which is just when you’re not allowed to. I called my mom and asked, ‘Why can’t I do this?’ She said, ‘Well, you’re not a robot.’ And I thought, Wow, that sucks: I’m inefficient, so I can’t be perfect. But that’s something I need to remember as I embark on the next chapter of my life.”

Why Your Perfectionism Irritates Everyone

Perfectionism can deplete your social capital, but there are ways to earn new deposits.

By Gregory Chasson

Sometimes, when we are so focused on ensuring that our work projects, self-care, living spaces, and relationships are just right, we can frustrate or aggravate friends, family, and colleagues.

Our perfectionistic tendencies are often turned inward, which is known as self-oriented perfectionism: We apply excessive standards and inflexible thinking to ourselves but not necessarily to others. When we are other-oriented in our perfectionism, though, our perfectionism projects outward and targets other people in our lives. Some perfectionists can be both self- and other-oriented; they are not mutually exclusive. And when we perceive the excessive expectations as coming from society, this is called socially prescribed perfectionism.

Each type of perfectionism can annoy others because when we are engaged in such rigid thinking, we often resort to the following two behavioral styles.

Safety behaviors. A hallmark of perfectionism is the tendency to engage in momentary coping strategies to help deal with the anxiety and other uncomfortable emotions powered by perfectionistic beliefs. These safety behaviors can include, for example, checking work a dozen times to make sure it’s correct or incessantly seeking approval from others. (“Is this OK? Are you sure?”) The same perfectionistic urges can also lead to the avoidance behavior of procrastination. Safety behaviors can anger others as they can lead to delays or broken promises; when it entails constant reassurance-seeking, a safety behavior can be draining.

Safety behaviors are often carried out because we’re anxious about not being good enough. However, when we avoid tasks or relentlessly recheck with others, we start to look like the very thing we fear becoming: an imposter.

Moralism. Perfectionism is often associated with being moralistic, or holding rigid and unreasonable moral standards for oneself and others. For self-oriented perfectionists, this can take the form of self-punishment; we might deny ourselves a reward because we judge our behavior as bad. Perfectionists can see themselves as unworthy and refuse to change their mind. This self-flagellation can be hard for others to witness, frustrating and disappointing the people around the perfectionist.

When perfectionistic moralism is projected outward, it can take the form of self-righteousness or the policing of others. But if we hold friends to unreasonable moral standards and tell them so, especially if we do it proudly, we’re liable to lose them. At minimum, people may feel they need to walk on eggshells around perfectionists to dodge their criticism.

Consider Your Social Capital

Along with resisting the urge to engage in safety behaviors, someone with perfectionist tendencies should consider their social capital. Imagine that we have a social bank account with every person in our lives and that they have a separate one with us. Everything we do that involves others can withdraw capital from, or deposit capital in, those accounts, and relationships become distressed when we spend too much. Before roping in others with our perfectionism, it can be helpful to determine whether there may be a social expense. If so, we need to decide whether it’s worth the withdrawal.

Gregory Chasson, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of Chicago and the author of Flawed: Why Perfectionism is a Challenge for Management.

Jovelle Tamayo / Used with permission

“Think About the Pitfalls”

“My personality leans toward perfectionism, but the way others perceive me influences that,” says Paul Youngbin Kim, a professor of psychology at Seattle Pacific University. “Asian Americans are often stereotyped as intelligent, high-achieving, and hard-working. When that’s internalized, it can look like perfectionism and have negative consequences for our well-being. For example, self-criticism can occur: That was good, but not good enough; I could have done more. I share my story with students and try to validate what we could call the positive aspects of perfectionism. They are motivated and driven, and it’s gotten them far. But they have to think about the pitfalls. I try to present empirical evidence for why perfectionism can work against them: As we know from the literature, perfectionism can correlate with procrastination because when you have such high standards, you put things off, and that gets in the way of achieving.”

Rebalance to Avoid Burnout

An inner perfectionist can drive anyone to exhaustion. It’s time to give yourself a break.

By Anna Katharina Schaffner

Wishing to do the things we do as well as we can is an unequivocally positive desire, as is the appreciation of excellence. However, that appreciation of excellence can easily morph into a paralyzing struggle to achieve perfection.

Perfectionists aspire to a condition of faultlessness and can have excessively high standards for their performance. They desire always to produce the ultimate, best, and flawless version of something. What makes perfectionism so dangerous? And how can we control it?

A study by Joachim Stoeber and Lavinia Damian differentiated between “perfectionist striving” and “perfectionist concerns.” This distinction is key. Perfectionist strivings, or desires to deliver excellent work and perform at the highest possible standard, are associated mainly with positive traits such as conscientiousness and problem-solving skills. Perfectionist concerns, or extreme worry over making mistakes or being negatively evaluated by others, however, are associated with harsh internal self-assessments of one’s performance and tend to correlate with less-welcome traits, such as neuroticism, and maladaptive strategies, such as avoidance.

Perfectionists have a low tolerance for ambiguity; along with flawlessness, they crave certainty. These traits, ironically, tend to make them less productive and efficient; for example, they may never let go of or turn in objectively good work because they are never happy with it, or believing nothing they do is good enough, they can disparage themselves and their skills, becoming their own worst enemy when there’s an opportunity to get ahead.

Perfectionism is correlated with workaholism, an excessive need to work that interferes with health, happiness, and the maintenance of personal relationships. Workaholics tend to be at higher risk for emotional distress and low psychological well-being because they do not get enough leisure time, exercise, or sleep. Unsurprisingly, they are also at higher risk of burnout. Working harder, judging their work more harshly, and living in fear of others’ assessments, they can experience physical and emotional exhaustion, diminished personal efficacy, and a loss of faith in their ability.

For many, perfectionism has its roots in childhood. An individual may have had parents with extremely high standards, been made to feel that they were never good enough, or received love from caregivers that was conditional and based on achievement. Such childhoods can often lead people to internalize critical voices from their past, hindering their emotional well-being later in life.

More broadly, perfectionism could be seen as a consequence of a cultural fetishization of productivity, efficiency, and, yes, perfection. In a culture based on competition, perfectionism in those with a tendency for it may be inevitable. If only we could all just strive for excellence without judging ourselves too harshly when we fall short, we could become “good enough perfectionists,” always trying our best but remaining gentle and forgiving with our fragile selves.

Anna Katharina Schaffner, Ph.D., is a burnout and executive coach and the author of Exhausted: An A-Z for the Weary.

Robyn Twomey/Redux Pictures

“The Achilles Heel of the Ambitious”

Psychologist Mary Anderson, author of the new book, The Happy High Achiever, says she wanted to write it 12 years ago, but perfectionism slowed her down: “I’m confident in my expertise, but I still worried: What if people don’t like it? What if it’s not good enough? That held me back for years. But what I’ve seen in my work is that perfectionism is the Achilles heel of the ambitious because you become terrified of making mistakes, don’t take risks, and don’t try anything you might not immediately look adept at. So life actually gets smaller. Some people ask me, ‘Is it bad to have ambition?’ No. It’s an advantageous trait. But when we tie our self-worth to our achievements, appearance, or performance, and think we need to prove that we’re valuable, lovable, or good enough, that’s when we see issues like chronic anxiety. Once you accept that your worth is inherent, that it’s unconditional, and that you don’t have to prove you’re flawless, that’s when you will excel.”

To Overcome Perfectionism, Try a Little Failure

Learning to live with imperfection could be the best way to overcome a fear of mistakes.

By Susan Krauss Whitbourne

People who struggle with perfectionism can find it impossible to move forward if they see any chance of failure ahead. They may have an idealized vision of how a project should work out, but once they start on it, all they can see are the many ways it could deviate from that image. If this desire to be perfect hampers one’s ability to get things done at work or in group settings, others could get frustrated, especially if the perfectionist constantly tries to redo their work.

An inability to accept anything short of flawless (whatever one’s perception of that may be) can lead to excessive self-criticism and “functional impairment,” according to a team led by Sarah Redden of Florida State University, whose recent research is based on the belief that a concern over making mistakes is at the heart of perfectionism and that it drives not pride in one’s work but a habit of viewing everything through a lens of how it fails to meet their unrealistically high standards.

If avoiding mistakes is central to perfectionism, the team wondered, wouldn’t it make sense to try to reduce this fear directly? In a typical cognitive behavioral therapy intervention, a therapist might use, among other approaches, intentional mistakes to help an individual realize that mess-ups aren’t as disastrous as they believe. However, this might not be enough, Redden and her colleagues believed. If such a crucial aspect of perfectionism is mistake-making, it should be more efficacious to give individuals a strong dose of it and, in fact, make it the main focus of therapy.

Forced Mistakes as Treatment

To test this idea, the team recruited a sample of 76 undergraduate women identified as high in perfectionism. Half received the mistakes-based treatment—exposure-based treatment for perfectionism—which involved a set of three online tasks lasting about seven minutes. The set was completed by each participant five times over two weeks.

The participants had been told what the plan was: to practice making mistakes over and over again in order to get used to the feeling of not doing things perfectly. The tasks were devised to be hard and to cause distress. For example, one involved copying a phrase or short sentence after being told to spell at least three words wrong; after each round, participants got a message telling them that they were incorrect. Another task involved being shown a series of shapes for one second and then being given 20 seconds to recall the order in which they appeared.

The intervention lowered participants’ levels of perfectionism and concern over making mistakes; it also produced lower levels of depression and social anxiety. Notably, it didn’t take very long to produce the intended effects, which was especially encouraging because theoretically people could access this intervention on their own online, giving it an edge in convenience over traditional therapy. The experiment had limitations; for example, the control group received no treatment, as opposed to an alternative form of therapy. Still, the results support the value of forcing perfectionists to make mistakes to help them become more accepting of failure.

If you are someone who gets stymied by the fear of doing something wrong, these results could provide some ideas about how to get over bumps in your productivity. The tasks employed in the study can spark some cognitive restructuring as you realize that mistakes aren’t that bad after all. But even if you can’t yet embrace that message, the results suggest that, on a practical level, simple repetition might be enough to take perfectionism down a few notches. When the desire to perform well has the unintended effect of lowering your ability to get things done, as well as your sense of self-worth, some mistake-making may be all you need. n

Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D., is a professor emerita of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.

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