Managing Perfectionism

Perfectionism is a tricky situation to handle. It is something that disguises itself as a good thing, a positive for our lives, our careers, and our relationships. But in reality, perfectionism can damage our creativity, our productivity, our achievements, our self-esteem, and much more.

We can define perfectionism as the desire to be flawless and to do flawless work. Sometimes, it affects only one aspect of our lives, like work, but other  times, we feel the pressure to be perfect in everything we do. While perfectionism can motivate us to try harder, it can also make us feel constantly anxious and concerned with our performance.

How Perfectionism Works

The main problem with perfectionism is that flawlessness is usually very hard or impossible to achieve. We can’t be perfect, especially not in everything we do. The drive to seek perfection can hurt us in different ways.

First, we can set the bar at an unreasonably high standard. This will make us devalue our actual achievements and feel that we can never measure up. It can hurt our self-esteem and make us feel incompetent. Perfectionism can heighten our anxiety and make us constantly worry about not doing enough. We can find it hard to experiment, to be creative, to try new things. Often, perfectionism makes us procrastinate until the last moment, because the possibility of doing something less than ideal is worse than not starting. With creative or personal projects, we might procrastinate for years because we don’t feel we can do justice to our ideas. 

Perfectionism and Anxiety

Perfectionism is often tied to the experience of anxiety. It can increase our worry and concern about being good enough and doing good enough work. . It can create a vicious cycle of procrastination and guilt when we don’t start working on time and produce a result, which makes us feel inadequate or worry that we might have done better. It makes us spend a lot more time thinking about our inadequacies and engage in a lot of negative thinking. Perfectionists tend to be highly concerned with how they are perceived, but they set high standards for themselves that they cannot possibly meet, not in their own eyes.

A perfectionist can often feel that they are never good enough. They are especially susceptible to the voice of the inner critic, a part of their mind that tells them that they could have and should have done better, which creates an ongoing train of negative thought. Overall, perfectionism can harm us more than it can help us, because it sets us up to fail. 

What To Do About It

But what can we do to improve and manage our perfectionism? The first thing to do is to accept that it is not helping us be better. Reading about it and learning more about the negative consequences of perfectionism is a good first step. This is important because we often perceive our perfectionism in a positive way - it means striving for more, setting high standards, being better than others, so we need to reframe it as a characteristics that is holding us back. 

A lot of the issues related to perfectionism connect with anxiety, especially the concern for getting the best results. Because of this, a good idea is to focus on the process, not on the results. This can allow us to relax, start without procrastinating, and work without limiting ourselves. Mindfulness can help us achieve a state where we are focused on what we are doing.

Our Thoughts As Fuel for Perfectionism

Mindfulness is a practice that has been proven to reduce anxiety.  Mindfulness involves keeping our mind grounded in the present, with no judgment, rather than letting it wander. While at first it can be challenging, with regular practice, it can feel more natural. Mindfulness allows us to stop worrying about the results and whether they are good enough, putting all of our energy and focus into what we are doing.

Another technique that can be useful for fighting perfectionism-related anxiety is challenging our thinking. A perfectionist is used to thinking of exceptionally high standards, of needing to do things a certain way. These patterns seem natural. However, it can be useful to challenge them. Dare yourself to think another way. What will happen if you don’t do it according to this standard? What would this look if you did it to be good enough, not perfect?

This technique involves challenging your usual thinking patterns and debating them, as if there were propositions, not facts. It might help to think that these things are said by your inner critic. What does the inner critic look like? What if the critic is wrong? What reasons can you find to support the alternative ideas? For example, if the critic often says that you are lazy, find evidence to prove that idea wrong: you work every day, you try your hardest, you achieve good results, etc. 

Practices that focus on the process and not on the result, like meditation or art, can also help let go of our perfectionism.  Doing something that we are not good at can push us to find a way and enjoy it for it’s own sake, even if it can be hard at first. Meditating, dancing, painting, journaling, or doing other things that don’t have a clear result or a clear outcome can help us experiment with what happens when we step beyond the boundaries of our perfectionism.

Perfectionism can be damaging to us in a lot of ways. It’s  important to work with it and, especially, with the anxiety that we feel due to exceedingly high expectations. Learning to focus on the process and finding ways to challenge our negative thinking patterns are good steps to being accepting of who we are and recognizing our own achievements. To find out more about our services, click here: anxiety counseling.