The other day I was tumbling around reddit and I found this question. It really got me thinking about all of the perfectionists I know in my life and how their standards are untenable, yet they continue to try anyway.

What is perfectionism?

I consider it an anxiety disorder actually. While the DSM 5 does not have perfectionism as a full on disorder, it is often a through line found through most anxiety disorders.

Essentially, perfectionism is a form of avoidance.

When we are striving for perfection, we’re actually trying to avoid some kind of discomfort. And we think that if we have really high standards and meet them all the time, then that discomfort we feel will go away.

The problem is actually less about the standards themselves, and more about the inflexibility and rigidity that accompanies the need to meet those standards.

We can absolutely have high standards for ourselves, but what differentiates a perfectionist from a non-perfectionist, is their flexibility to adjust to changes that might interfere with meeting their standards and their willingness to accept their own limitations.

I also believe folks who don’t suffer from perfectionism, but who still maintain high standards, are really good at prioritizing what’s truly important from what’s not. Perfectionists want everything to be prioritized as important.  

Perfectionists also crave control, which makes sense when what’s happening below the surface feels like chaos. Nothing infuriates a perfectionist more than phrases like, “just let it go” or “it’s okay to fail”.

Of course, if it was that easy, they’d have let it go and been okay with failure.

 Grieving the Losses

When you’re in recovery for debilitating perfectionism, one of your first tasks is to grieve. Grieve the life you thought you should be living, the ways in which perfectionism blocked you from feeling entitled to relax or feel safe, and to grieve the aspects of your life you truly will need to reconsider and change (and that can feel scary!).

Perfectionism is intimately tied with the ego.

This is the part of the psyche that is so identified with what you are and what others expect you to be. If you’ve had 800 irons in the fire because you thought that being productive made you important and “not lazy”, the ego is going to fight hard to preserve that.

To the egoic mind, uncertainty and non-identity is the equivalent of a death. You’re not actually going to die if you stop being a perfectionist, but to the ego it feels that way.

When you can allow your grief to help you move through this change, you get to discover a kind of opening within the self.

No, you will not become “lazy” or any other such adjectives your mind throws at you when you begin to heal this. In actuality, you’ll become more flexible and able to cope with imperfection.

Actually, I’d like to challenge you right now to look at words like imperfection, mediocre, just okay, good enough, and see them as your friends.

I’m not asking you to swing in the opposite direction and begin exclusively identifying with these words, I’m merely hoping that you can start to imagine a life where being good enough, imperfect, sometimes mediocre, isn’t a death sentence. It’s just part of being human.

None of us will ever achieve the drives of our perfectionism because nothing in this life is truly perfect. And if you think you can, you’ll discover burnout waiting for you after a certain point, which is simply your mind and body’s wisdom saying, “Hey, this is too much! We gotta find a different way”.  

Here are some questions for you to consider:

1.    In what was is perfectionism burdening my life?

2.    What would it look like to take my perfectionism and turn it down a notch or two (for those who think in scales, imagine perfection being a 10 and imperfection being a 1. Where can you take the current number you’re at and drop it down by 1 point?)?

3.    What is my perfectionism helping me to avoid? What makes that experience/feeling/memory something I need to avoid?

4.    If I wasn’t avoiding, how might I cope differently? You might need to intentionally engage in low-stakes activities like drawing or painting and purposefully let them be imperfect to practice learning new ways of being with that feeling.

5.    What would my life actually look like if I could place boundaries around the need to be perfect all the time? What other things would I get done? What relationships would be improved?