There's a price to be paid for perfectionism – anxiety, depression, self-harm, workaholism and eating disorders, writes FIONOLA MEREDITH
NOBODY’S PERFECT – but that doesn’t stop some of us from trying to be. And that’s the curse of perfectionism: putting yourself under enormous pressure to meet impossibly high standards, striving to keep everything in perfect order, beating yourself up for any little error.
Taken to its extremes, perfectionism can even lead to a kind of paralysis where people get caught up in a cycle of endless procrastination: because they expect so much of themselves, the pressure to perform becomes overwhelming. It’s not surprising that so many of us find ourselves falling into this thankless trap: after all, we live in a culture where perfectionism is seen as a quality to be celebrated, a passport to success.
Posters on the walls of school classrooms exhort pupils to never give up, to give their all, to aim for the skies. But there’s a price to be paid for adhering to such unrelenting standards: perfectionism is associated with anxiety, depression, self-harm, workaholism and eating disorders.
As Richard Winter, author of Perfecting Ourselves to Death, points out, “when a person’s self-worth depends on reaching those high standards, it is an inevitable script for self-defeat and their own personal hell of repeated failure and eternal regret”.
I’m familiar with the demands of that inner perfectionist voice, finding it hard to leave tasks unfinished and spending far too long trying to make things just right. As for mistakes, let’s just say I try desperately not to make them. For instance, on one occasion, I stumbled over the pronunciation of the word “epidemiology” during a live radio debate. After several attempts to get it right, I gave up and moved on. But I was tortured for the rest of the day by that simple error, blushing anew and groaning with embarrassment every time I thought of it.
My friend, who also suffers from her own unrelenting standards, thinks that people sometimes use the term as a veiled boast. “When people say, ‘I’m a perfectionist’, often what they’re saying is, ‘I won’t let any shoddy workmanship pass my fingers’.”
But true perfectionism is nothing to be proud of. “It’s a kind of mental ball and chain. It’s the inner voice that tells you ‘Why bother writing that novel if it’s not going to be good enough to win the Booker prize?’ or ‘Why begin that painting when you know it can never compare with a Matisse canvas?’ Perfectionism stifles creativity. It’s about sacrificing joy in favour of control.”
And perfectionists can never truly relax: every hour in the day must be used productively. As the author of the Perfectionist Mum blog wryly notes: “You can never let go and ‘just be’, because there is always something to be done to make you or your life more perfect. You fail to appreciate the good in your life already, because you are constantly striving for perfection or the next better thing.”
The anxious need to feel in control – of yourself, of your work, of your immediate environment – does seem to be central to the perfectionist mindset, and there is a strong link between perfectionism and obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Many perfectionists seem to work from the unconscious assumption that by pushing themselves extremely hard and by being constantly vigilant, they will be beyond reproach, safe from harm. Essentially, they are in search of a feeling of safety, of certainty, in a terribly uncertain world. Clinical psychologist Roger Bailey says this behaviour has ancient origins. “In order to survive and adapt to a hostile environment, our ancestors had to be mentally agile. Our intellect is what kept us alive: we had to be able to predict what would happen next, to know what was safe and what wasn’t. The nervous system developed as an incredible alarm system, a mechanism to keep us safe. That’s why anxiety is the most intolerable human emotion: it is designed to save our lives, but sometimes it translates into behaviour that becomes dysfunctional.”
Most psychotherapists agree that at the root of perfectionism is a fragile sense of self-worth. Ann Twomey, a Dublin-based cognitive behavioural therapist, says that if you have low self-esteem, you will work all the harder in an attempt to prove that you are a worthwhile person. She says that perfectionism is often associated with black and white, all-or-nothing thinking.
“Take the example of the perfectionistic crash diet that many women go on. You have lettuce for lunch, lettuce for dinner, and you probably don’t even like lettuce. How long is that going to last? It’s better to aim lower, but reach higher: do something sustainable and achievable to change your lifestyle, like switch from white bread to brown bread. The idea is that you can drop your standards and still have self-worth.”
Challenging that rigid black and white thinking is key to changing perfectionist impulses. Cognitive therapist Jeffrey Young says that perfectionists believe that something is either perfect or it is a failure: “you cannot imagine just doing something well. On a scale of 0 to 100, if your performance is not 100, or maybe 98 or 99, then it might as well be 0, the way it feels to you. You have to learn that it is possible to do something 80 per cent or 70 per cent and still do a very good job. Between perfection and failure there is a whole grey area.”
In a recent blog post, Perfectionist Mum described how she made pancakes with her children on Shrove Tuesday: “I congratulate myself at allowing the process to get crazy, chaotic and imperfect, and not losing it somewhere in the middle. Not so many months ago, I might have given up, shouted, cried, and basically had a tantrum because it didn’t all run smoothly. I can’t say that will never happen again, but I’m proud of myself for letting go of the need to be in control, and of celebrating imperfection with my children.”
Celebrating imperfection – now there’s a radical idea. For those of us in thrall to the impossible dream of perfection, it may be the very medicine we need.
