While striving to make the results of your work to be the best version of what they can be, is a positive attitude to adopt for most of your efforts in life, when you start spending too much time on simple tasks, getting stressed over your work and insecure about its results, your perfectionism becomes a problem.
When perfectionism backfires, you can fight it using a variety of different methods, including voluntary discomfort, keeping a journal of your perfectionism-induced negative thoughts, keeping a journal of positive affirmations, celebrating your mistakes, taking a cost-benefit analysis of your perfectionistic tendencies, as well as tackling bad habits (like procrastination), which develop as a result of perfectionism.
Traits of a perfectionist
Perfectionism is a personality trait that includes the desire to be flawless and free from faults, high (possibly unrealistic) standards in everything, and a highly critical attitude toward oneself, and often others. When discussing the maladaptive version of perfectionism (one which takes all of these characteristics to an extreme), it is implied that the person in question is obsessed with achieving an unattainable ideal, chasing which sucks the time out of them, reduces their productivity, and when this unrealistic goal isn’t meat, depression can follow.
Perfectionists differ from high achievers in that they are driven by fear of failure, while achievers are by the desire for excellence.
Excellence is very distinct from perfection in this context, because it leaves room for minor flaws, while perfection, using an example of the ancient proverb, can mean excessively polishing your work to the point, when it turns to dust.
Common behaviors and traits, which characterize perfectionists:
- goal-orientation, they tend to focus on the clear objective and perfect execution of it.
- problem-identification, perfectionists like to dig deep into details of everything they are involved in and tend to attempt at polishing everything to the best possible state.
- organized – any degree of mess around them is bound to cause distress, therefore it is dealt with swiftly.
- demanding of themselves and others in terms of performance, work ethic, dedication.
- have a set of rules and best practices which should be followed (“should” and “must” are words, often present in perfectionist’s vocabulary).
- putting enormous efforts into optimizing and improving trivial activities.
- avoiding starting projects, or having ambitions of beginning some new ambitious ventures, because of insecurity of own ability to deliver the flawless result.
- avoiding smaller, limited goals (like publishing an article or a small app), as not worthy of starting to pursue.
- having trouble completing projects, as they always find something, that causes them an itch to improve and fix it.
- having trouble delegating and outsourcing work to others, as a perfectionist will only trust himself to do the job right.
- caring too much about things, which weren’t done perfectly, fixating on past failures.
- thinking in extremes, all-or-nothing terms (false dichotomy is a go-to fallacy), e.g. “I’ve failed to exercise this week, might as well quit doing it altogether”.
- constantly rephrasing themselves to get some particular point across.
- spending more time on supportive work, like editing, tuning, organizing, rather than creation itself.
Why perfection is harmful
As we’ve discovered, perfectionism can be maladaptive – having the worst of its traits and manifestations cranked up to eleven, causing you to perform poorly and to experience negative feelings, related to your achievements and results of your work.
Despite the desire to achieve perfection can be seen as a positive personality trait, perfectionism can be fundamentally negative and pessimistic.
To further explore and better demonstrate the negative effects of perfectionism we need to be aware of the 3 recognized types of it, also known as Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale:
- self-oriented (SOP) perfectionism, imposing a desire for perfection on yourself.
- other-oriented (OOP) perfectionism, expecting perfection from others.
- socially-prescribed (SPP) perfectionism, perceiving expectations for perfection from others toward yourself.
Even though these types of perfectionism have distinct characteristics and often manifest themselves differently in different situations, they also have plenty of commonalities. For example, while some types of perfectionists tend to get along with people better than the others and experience less unpleasant situations, perfectionism is detrimental to relationships in most cases.
1. Negatively impacts self-esteem
As a perfectionist is a very goal-oriented person, he/she is also by definition is going to be preoccupied with reaching the most perfect, polished, and refined versions of their goals. They also tend to find more and more improvements, which can be made along the way to deliver the ideal work, flawless in its design and execution.
Excessive refining, polishing, and optimizing, however, comes at a cost. As the heap of enhancements grows, each new improvement’s time cost rises. At the same time, when perfectionist’s flawless fruits of labor meet the flawed world, with all of its fuzziness, imperfection, and unpredictability, their results tend not to meet the expectations of perfection.
In real-world examples it means that:
- either you’ve gone way over deadline with all the polishing to the software you were developing and, instead of delivering a minimum viable version of the product and keeping business profitable, you’ve just run out of money.
- or when your perfectly engineered program has met actual data and started being used by unpredictable users, you have started seeing instability, crashes, and bugs, which are not characteristic to perfection.
The desired perfection never came to fruition, and the feared failure has just revealed itself in the most damaging way to your feeling of self-worth.
Fear of failure is one of the most iconic traits of a maladaptive perfectionist, and with the unrealistically high standards for perfection, failure is very easy to achieve. And when that happens self-esteem suffers.
Success only serves as a temporary relief in life, spent in anxious anticipation of failure, for such people. And stable self-esteem is formed on a deep consistent source, on a foundation of proper self-knowledge and quality relationships, not from reliefs after occasional successes.
2. Often accompanied by mental health issues like eating disorders, depression, anxiety
Several studies confirmed perfectionism being the risk-factor for disorders like anorexia (trying to attain the perfect lean physique to the point of becoming a malnourished husk of a human being, driven by fear of being perceived obese).
Repeated blows to self-esteem from constant “failures” to reach perfection can cause the person to become depressed.
If you fear failures and perceive yourself as either winner or loser, strong or weak, worthy or worthless, you lock yourself in dichotomous thinking. For you, doing well in anything is never enough, and it makes you anxious to do everything perfectly, otherwise – you’ve failed. Fail enough times – and you’re on the right track to seeing yourself as a loser, and being depressed.
The negative self-talk and tendency to focus on past failures, which accompany perfectionism, tend to bring about all sorts of issues into the lives of the affected, distorting their focus and mental equilibrium with vicious, unforgiving self-criticism.
3. Causes procrastination
Surprisingly, perfectionists tend to avoid starting new projects and put off many items from to-do lists for “better times”.
Since you expect outstanding performance, while at the same time doubting whether you can achieve your high standards for perfection (maybe from the track record of past “failures”, and overt fixation on them), you have an urge to divert your efforts for something less demanding. Organizing, tweaking something, or procrastinating in any other way.
You wait out, sheltered from high demands, imposed on yourself, and postpone action until the circumstances are perfect. This is an example of a perfectionism-procrastination connection.
And a general tendency to avoid challenges, think rigidly and lack creativity is observed in perfectionists.
4. Detrimental to quality of relationships
Perfectionists often experience a lower quality of relationships, find themselves to be less desirable partners, than those who don’t demand perfection from themselves and others, and end up in many instances of unproductive social friction.
A study into desirability of perfectionists was conducted on a group of people who were presented with 5 simulated dating profiles (for 3 types of perfectionism, plus explicitly non-perfectionistic personality and a baseline personality profile) and were asked to evaluate the possibility of responding to those profiles. Here are their findings:
- people are less interested in perfectionists, especially in other-oriented ones.
- only people with masochistic tendencies or other impaired relationship preferences are interested in people who think of themselves as inadequate and are vocal about it.
- participants described perfectionists as lacking warmth and being less likable
- socially-prescribed perfectionists are the best dating prospect, compared to the other two types, with least-likable being other-oriented ones.
- people who consider themselves a perfectionist tend to seek out other perfectionists, and are less interested in non-perfectionistic profiles. This suggests, that if you think your partner is a perfectionist, but you don’t consider yourself as one, you might take another good look at your tendencies.
- self-oriented perfectionists were seen as less competent as non-perfectionists but as the most competent among the types of perfectionists.
On top of that, perfectionists are prone to many errors in personal relationships:
- they could get competitive with their partner.
- tend to avoid sharing personal fears, insecurities, weaknesses, which hinders the ability for emotional intimacy.
- they want to appear strong and in control of their emotions, making themselves emotionally unavailable for their partners.
When perfectionism is helpful
Adaptive form of perfectionism is an advantageous variation of striving for perfection, when the person has high standards for their work and is able to tap into the sense of urgency, staying in a sweet spot between boredom and anxiety.
In this case, they can push themselves to achieve exceptional results, avoid becoming indifferent to their efforts, but at the same time aren’t plagued by performance anxiety and fear from the anticipation of a failure.
People with adaptive perfectionism also know their limitations and will not overexert themselves unless it is absolutely unavoidable.
Someone like that will thrive in a highly competitive “winner takes all” environment. They also will excel in professions with high demand for precision and quality of execution, something where the price of failure is high.
Then again, people like that would be commonly referred to as high-achievers, rather than “adaptive perfectionists”.
Reasons behind the development of maladaptive perfectionism
Perfectionism is inherited to a significant degree, as well as nurtured by controlling parenting:
- self-oriented and socially-prescribed perfectionism are often transmitted from parent to child.
- both of them manifest themselves stronger with the age of a child
- obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in a parent, as well as depression and anxiety are predictable of these two types of perfectionism in children
- psychological control over children (i.e intrusive, overly demanding and commanding parenting) in parents with maladaptive perfectionism is a big part of perfectionistic parenting (especially pronounced in father-son and mother-daughter interactions) and is an influencing factor for developing of perfectionism in a child.
Correlation and similarity between perfectionism and OCD are apparent, and here’s an example from a renowned clinical psychologist’s practice with an OCD patient:
I had a client decades ago who suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. He had to line up his pyjamas just right before he could go to sleep at night. Then he had to fluff his pillow. Then he had to adjust the bedsheets. Over and over and over and over. I said, “Maybe that part of you, that insanely persistent part, wants something, inarticulate though it may be. Let it have its say. What could it be?” He said, “Control.” I said, “Close your eyes and let it tell you what it wants. Don’t let fear stop you. You don’t have to act it out, just because you’re thinking it.” He said, “It wants me to take my stepfather by the collar, put him up against the door, and shake him like a rat”
Jordan B Peterson, “12 Rules for Life”
Here’s a take on perfectionism from another psychotherapist:
The most important thing to remember about perfectionism is that it is fundamentally a form of self-hatred. The perfectionistic patient believes he cannot be loved for his essence, only if he becomes the same as an ideal. He believes he is not unconditionally lovable for who he is; he believes he can be loved only conditionally, based on what he does. Perfectionism, in its neurotic form, is the love of the perfect and the hatred of the person.
Jon Frederickson, “Co-Creating Change”
Perfectionists can develop internal pressures like the desire to avoid failure and critical judgment as a result of any other type of childhood trauma, not just controlling parenting. I can also be an adaptation to an unpredictable, unsafe, and chaotic environment during the earliest years of the life of a person.
Don’t count out the modern life with its abundance of metrics, competitiveness, and demanding workplaces, which don’t mind causing burnout systematically, as long as deadlines are met.
We live in an unforgiving and demanding time when much of the aesthetic beauty is erased from the architecture and museums, and modern art displays grotesque and distorted caricatures of reality, instead of ideals and heroes.
It may very well be that people are trying to re-create something ideal, in whatever areas of life it is available for them, so that the bland and brutal world around them would gain character and meaning.
Unfortunately, they end up sacrificing their relationships and are rarely happy with the results of their work, as standards for perfection are often set unrealistically high.
How to overcome perfectionism and procrastination
As perfectionism can be a result of adverse childhood experience, self-knowledge will be your main weapon in fighting its maladaptive version. You will have to take time and dig into your history, if possible have some in-depth conversations with parents (or other people involved in raising you).
You will also have to ask yourself some questions, while whole-heartedly expecting honest answers, even if they are inconvenient, can make you uncomfortable and are hard to accept.
Am I a perfectionist, without knowing it? If yes, what kind of perfectionist am I? How does it affect my relationships, self-esteem, productivity? How much do I depend on perfectionism? What is its source? Should I be less perfectionistic? How would that version of me look like, can I imagine being different? Would I still be me if I weren’t a perfectionist, or would I be “more” me?
1. Getting rid of perfectionistic procrastination
The best way of getting rid of perfectionism-induced procrastination is to take small steps to get challenging and uncomfortable work done. Keep challenging yourself and getting out of the comfort zone, keep doing the things, which cause you to grow and improve.
But, do that in finely-measured doses, to keep things easy and accessible for yourself. If you’re planning on writing an article, but keep putting it away – just write one good paragraph (or even one acceptable sentence) today, but keep doing it daily. Over time, slowly (or rapidly – use your own pace) increase the amount of work done, tasks finished and challenges overcome.
But don’t expect to become a productivity-radiating workhorse overnight (or over a month), progress will come to you at the exact pace, at which it is meant to. You’ll get into a habit of doing uncomfortable and challenging things.
Besides that, be less critical of your results at those finely-dosed attempts, embrace failures and mistakes, and be happy to all the learning experience you’re getting while doing your imperfect work.
2. Remove perfectionism in relationships
Recognize, that marriage is a partnership between two people, who see each other as equals and are open to influence one another to become better and bring the best out of their mutual relationship. You never start as a perfect match for your partner and neither do they for you. Instead, you both become such over time, as your mutual interaction shapes and hones your characters, personalities and habits.
With this understanding, you’ll recognize, that getting competitive with your spouse, or withholding weaknesses to appear stronger hinders your communication, emotional intimacy, and understanding.
3. How to stop being a perfectionist
When applied to life in general and to “generic” version of perfectionism (outside of those particular cases described above), you have several tool at your disposal to fight perfectionism:
- Write a journal of your perfectionistic thoughts, which you’ve had over the day, and which lead you to feel bad, record them late in the evening, and write down what you thought at the time.
- Find five successes for each failure you see in yourself and your work.
- Get involved with a group of people, who are trying to achieve the same goal as you, to make the process more enjoyable.
- See the world and yourself as a spectrum of colors – you are a composite personality of multiple skills, interests, abilities, and traits – you simply cannot be worthy or worthless – the false dichotomy of black and white, which perfectionists tend to apply to everything is unrealistic.
- Celebrate your mistakes – give yourself a reward for every non-critical mistake, and accept it as a good learning experience (but do learn from it).
- Time off isn’t time wasted – give yourself mini-vacations, take a day off to watch a movie, visit some nice places around you and clear your head from anxieties and clutter.
- Throw multitasking away – it is an energy-sucking, efficiency-decreasing, memory-disrupting, stress-creating monster, nobody in the history has benefited from multi-tasking
- Practice meditation and mindfulness. Have the mind presence and clarity throughout the day on every day of the week.
- Write down a journal of positive affirmations.
- Mess up on purpose or do a voluntary discomfort exercise, address stoicism for step-by-step instructions.
Armed with all the knowledge above, remember that perfection is an unrealistic ideal, which can be a great source of motivation as an ambitious goal to get as close to as possible, but will be a terrible source of the perpetual cycle of anxiety as a target which must be reached.
