Perfectionism becomes a problem when your standards are so demanding that meeting them determines how you feel about yourself. Learning how to overcome perfectionism involves examining the expectations you live by, understanding what makes mistakes so difficult to tolerate and changing the behaviours that keep those fears alive. You can continue aiming for excellent results without making your self-worth depend on achieving them.
Imagine you’ve spent several weeks working on an important project. You’ve done the research, solved the problems that came up and delivered something you’re genuinely pleased with. Your manager congratulates you, your colleagues are impressed and, as far as you can tell, the project has been a success.
That evening, however, you’re thinking about a minor detail you could have handled differently. By the following morning, you’ve identified another three things that might have improved the result. Within a week, the satisfaction you felt when you finished has disappeared, and you’re already worrying about whether your next project will be good enough.
Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar. You work hard, achieve what you set out to do and still struggle to feel satisfied. You might even dismiss your accomplishments because you think they weren’t particularly difficult, or because somebody else has achieved something more impressive.
People often describe this behaviour as ambition, discipline or having high standards. Those qualities may certainly be involved, but they don’t explain why a person can accomplish so much and remain so dissatisfied with themselves.
To understand that, we need to look at what their achievements mean to them.
What is perfectionism, and when does it become a problem?
Perfectionism is commonly understood as the desire to do things perfectly, but psychologists distinguish between different aspects of it.
One involves setting demanding personal standards and working towards them. Researchers call this perfectionistic strivings. The other, known as perfectionistic concerns, involves worrying excessively about mistakes, doubting the quality of your performance and believing that other people expect you to be perfect.
These dimensions can exist together, but they don’t necessarily have the same psychological consequences.
Consider two people who are preparing to give a presentation at work. Both want to do an excellent job, so they research their subject thoroughly, organise the material and spend time practising. Their preparation might look almost identical.
The difference becomes apparent when something goes wrong.
The first person forgets a detail during the presentation. They’re annoyed with themselves, particularly because they spent so much time preparing, but they recognise that the mistake doesn’t invalidate everything else they’ve done. They might make a note to prepare that particular section differently next time.
The second person finds it much harder to move on. They spend the rest of the day thinking about the mistake, wondering whether their colleagues noticed and imagining that their manager now considers them less competent. The positive feedback they received seems irrelevant because they know the presentation could have been better.
Both people care about doing good work. For the second person, however, the mistake has acquired a meaning that extends beyond the presentation itself. It threatens something important about the way they see themselves.
Research supports the importance of this distinction. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis involving 416 studies and more than 113,000 participants found that perfectionistic concerns were more strongly associated with symptoms of anxiety, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder than perfectionistic strivings. The latter also showed associations with psychological symptoms, although these were generally smaller.
That doesn’t establish that perfectionism causes those difficulties, but it does challenge the idea that all forms of perfectionism are equally problematic.
Having high standards may be important to you, and there’s no reason you should abandon them simply because you occasionally feel disappointed with your performance. The concern arises when you struggle to evaluate your work realistically, when mistakes provoke disproportionate distress or when your standards begin interfering with your ability to enjoy what you’ve achieved.
Another revealing question is what happens when you decide that you’ve done enough. Can you finish something because it meets the requirements of the task, or do you need to keep working until you feel completely certain that nobody could find anything wrong with it?
Those are two very different ways of approaching the same responsibility.
Where does perfectionism come from?
The expectations we develop about ourselves are influenced by temperament, personal experiences, relationships and the environments in which we grow up. There isn’t one childhood experience that explains every perfectionist, and it would be a mistake to assume that anybody with demanding standards must have had critical parents or an unhappy upbringing.
Nevertheless, our early relationships can influence what we come to believe we need to do to receive approval, maintain affection or avoid unpleasant consequences.
Imagine a child who receives considerable attention when they achieve excellent marks at school. Their parents congratulate them, praise their intelligence and tell relatives how well they’re doing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with celebrating a child’s achievements.
But suppose the child receives noticeably less attention when their results are ordinary, while mistakes are met with disappointment or criticism. Over time, they may begin associating achievement with approval and failure with the possibility of losing it.
Another child might grow up in a household where mistakes regularly lead to arguments. Becoming exceptionally organised, obedient or responsible could help them avoid conflict. What begins as a useful response to their environment may eventually develop into an expectation that they must anticipate every problem and prevent anything from going wrong.
These experiences don’t produce identical outcomes in everyone. Two children can respond differently to similar circumstances, and perfectionism can also develop in environments that don’t appear particularly demanding.
What matters is the meaning a person develops around their performance.
Someone who has learned that being competent brings recognition may become increasingly uncomfortable whenever they don’t know how to do something. Another person may feel responsible for keeping everyone around them happy because disagreement has become associated with distress.
Years later, these expectations may be so familiar that they no longer recognise them as something they’ve learned.
They simply consider themselves responsible, conscientious or independent.
And perhaps they are. The problem appears when these qualities become requirements they feel unable to question.
When your self-worth depends on achievement
Psychologists sometimes use the term conditional self-worth to describe situations in which a person’s evaluation of themselves depends heavily on meeting particular standards.
You might feel reasonably confident when you’re productive, receive praise or achieve something important, only to find that your confidence deteriorates when you make a mistake.
Your opinion of yourself changes according to your performance.
This relationship is particularly relevant to the concept of clinical perfectionism, in which self-evaluation becomes excessively dependent on pursuing and achieving demanding standards despite the negative consequences.
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis examining perfectionism and self-esteem in adults found that perfectionistic concerns were associated with lower self-esteem. The association between perfectionistic strivings and self-esteem was much smaller.
Consider what this means in everyday life.
If being successful is an important part of how you evaluate yourself, an achievement may provide temporary reassurance that you’re competent and worthy of recognition. But that reassurance can disappear as soon as you encounter another challenge.
You finish one project and feel relieved, only to start worrying about the next. You receive a compliment but dismiss it because you think the person offering it doesn’t understand how much better the result could have been.
Even your accomplishments may become difficult to enjoy because you keep adjusting the standards against which you measure them.
Eventually, you can find yourself pursuing goals that no longer have much to do with what you actually want. You’re working towards them because falling short would make you feel inadequate.
And that’s an important distinction when we’re trying to understand why perfectionism can become so exhausting.
Why perfectionism makes you push yourself too hard
From the outside, perfectionistic behaviour can look remarkably effective. Someone who prepares thoroughly, pays attention to detail and rarely misses a deadline may be considered an excellent employee. Their colleagues might admire their discipline, and their manager may have every reason to appreciate their work.
What those people don’t necessarily see is the amount of anxiety involved in maintaining that performance.
An employee might spend an extra two hours checking something that was already correct because they’re frightened of being criticised. Someone else might agree to take on another project because they can’t bear the possibility of disappointing their manager.
Both behaviours may produce favourable results, at least initially. But the person carrying them out may be motivated as much by the desire to avoid an unpleasant feeling as by the value of the work itself.
This helps explain why some perfectionists continue pushing themselves long after the additional effort has stopped producing meaningful improvements.
Why excessive checking can become a habit
Suppose you need to send an important email.
You’ve checked the information, corrected the grammar and made sure the message is clear. By any reasonable standard, it’s ready to send.
But you hesitate.
You read it again, reconsider the tone and change a sentence because you’re worried it might sound inappropriate. Then you make another adjustment, which means you need to check the whole message again.
Eventually, you send it and feel relieved.
The next time you write an important email, you may find yourself going through exactly the same process.
In psychology, this can be explained through negative reinforcement. When a behaviour reduces an unpleasant feeling, we’re more likely to repeat it.
By checking the email repeatedly, you’ve managed to reduce your anxiety. The immediate relief makes the checking feel useful, even if the additional corrections contributed very little to the quality of the message.
Over time, you may become increasingly convinced that you need to follow this routine to prevent something going wrong.
The same mechanism can operate when you overprepare for meetings, repeatedly seek reassurance or avoid delegating responsibilities. The behaviour provides some relief in the moment, but it doesn’t necessarily help you develop confidence in your ability to manage uncertainty.
And uncertainty is unavoidable.
You can prepare thoroughly for a job interview and still be rejected. You can organise an important event and have something go wrong. You can be thoughtful towards somebody and still disappoint them.
When you interpret every unexpected outcome as evidence that you should have worked harder, you begin holding yourself responsible for things that weren’t entirely under your control.
Eventually, your standards may become less concerned with producing a good result and more concerned with preventing anything unpleasant from happening.
That’s an extraordinarily demanding expectation to place on yourself.
How perfectionism affects your everyday life
Perfectionism doesn’t affect everyone in the same way. Some people become highly productive, while others struggle to begin or complete important tasks. You might be relaxed about making mistakes in one area of your life and excessively demanding in another.
The effects also depend on what your standards are helping you achieve and what they prevent you from doing.
You lose touch with what you actually want
One consequence that’s easy to overlook is how perfectionism can influence your decisions.
Imagine you’ve been offered a promotion. It would involve additional responsibilities, longer working hours and considerably more pressure. The salary is attractive, but you’re not particularly interested in the position and you’ve already been thinking about reducing your workload.
Nevertheless, refusing the opportunity makes you uncomfortable.
You imagine how your colleagues might react, whether your manager would be disappointed and what turning it down might suggest about your ambition.
Before long, you’re considering accepting a job you don’t want because you’re worried about what refusing it would mean.
This is one way perfectionistic expectations can interfere with your ability to make decisions according to your own priorities.
When approval, competence or achievement become particularly important to your self-esteem, you may start paying more attention to what you believe is expected of you than to whether those expectations make sense for your life.
You can be exceptionally good at meeting goals without having spent much time considering whether they’re goals you genuinely want to pursue.
You struggle to enjoy your achievements
Suppose you’ve worked towards a professional qualification for several years. You pass your final assessment, receive your certificate and finally accomplish what you’ve been trying to achieve.
You might expect to feel satisfied for a while.
Instead, you start thinking about what comes next.
Perhaps you compare yourself with someone who completed the qualification sooner, earned a higher mark or has already progressed further in their career.
The result you’ve worked so hard to achieve begins to seem ordinary almost immediately.
This is particularly likely when your attention is directed towards what you haven’t accomplished rather than towards a realistic evaluation of what you have.
People can also give disproportionate weight to negative feedback. A single critical comment may occupy their attention despite receiving overwhelmingly positive responses.
I explored this tendency in why your brain ignores praise and obsesses over criticism.
The difficulty for someone with strong perfectionistic concerns is that even legitimate achievements can become sources of disappointment. They notice the imperfections, minimise what went well and establish another demanding objective.
Over time, this can make achievement a surprisingly unsatisfying way to organise your life.
After all, if the pleasure of reaching a goal disappears as soon as you reach it, you might reasonably wonder why you keep expecting the next one to make such an enormous difference.
You procrastinate because you’re afraid of doing something badly
Perfectionism is often associated with excessive productivity, but it can also contribute to procrastination.
Someone who is particularly frightened of making mistakes may delay starting a task because beginning it means confronting the possibility that they won’t perform as well as they expect.
Preparation offers a convenient alternative.
Imagine you want to write a book.
You research writing techniques, compare publishing platforms, read interviews with successful authors and spend weeks deciding how to organise your material. You may even buy new software because you’re convinced that a better system will help you produce better work.
Some of this preparation will be useful. The problem arises when you continue preparing long after you have enough information to begin.
You can spend months learning everything there is to know about writing a book without writing any of the bloody thing.
While you’re preparing, the eventual result remains an attractive possibility. Once you begin, you’ll have to deal with the limitations of what you can actually produce.
You might discover that your first chapter isn’t particularly good, that an idea doesn’t work or that writing is more difficult than you expected.
These are ordinary experiences when learning or undertaking a demanding project. But if mistakes feel like evidence of personal inadequacy, avoiding the task can become a way of avoiding those feelings.
Of course, procrastination can have many causes. Perfectionism is only one possible explanation, and it’s important to consider the circumstances rather than assuming that every delay conceals a fear of failure.
Nevertheless, if you repeatedly postpone things that matter to you because you don’t feel sufficiently prepared, examining your expectations may be more useful than buying another productivity planner.
You treat rest as something you have to earn
Some people find it difficult to stop working even when there is nothing particularly urgent left to do.
They sit down to watch a film and begin thinking about the tasks they haven’t completed. They take a day off and spend much of it feeling guilty because they could have accomplished something useful.
Even enjoyable activities can become additional responsibilities.
Perhaps you started exercising because you liked it, but now you feel disappointed with yourself whenever you miss a session. Or you began learning a language for pleasure and gradually turned it into another performance target.
You might notice that you rarely do something simply because you enjoy it.
There has to be a purpose, an improvement or some measurable result that justifies the time involved.
If you’ve learned to associate productivity with being responsible or worthwhile, rest can feel uncomfortable because it involves temporarily stepping away from the activities through which you usually evaluate yourself.
This doesn’t mean that you should ignore your responsibilities or abandon your commitments whenever you feel tired. It means recognising that your time and energy are limited, and that constantly demanding more of both may eventually undermine the very goals you’re trying to achieve.
A person can work extremely hard and still have reasonable limits.
Why guilt makes perfectionism difficult to change
Guilt is particularly relevant when perfectionism involves expectations about responsibility, productivity and other people’s approval.
Imagine you’ve spent years being the person everybody relies on. You rarely refuse requests, often take on additional responsibilities and have become accustomed to helping people even when doing so causes problems for you.
One evening, somebody asks you for a favour. You’re exhausted and already have plans, so you decide to say no.
The other person accepts your answer without complaining.
Nevertheless, you spend the evening wondering whether you’ve been selfish.
Perhaps you begin considering whether you should change your mind, even though your original decision was entirely reasonable.
The uncomfortable feeling may have very little to do with anything you’ve actually done wrong. You may be experiencing guilt because you’ve violated an expectation that you’ve followed for years.
Guilt can serve an important function. When our actions harm someone or contradict our values, it can encourage us to recognise what happened and take responsibility.
But we can also experience guilt when we behave differently from what we’ve learned to expect of ourselves.
If you’ve spent years believing that a good person should always be available, prioritising your own needs may produce guilt even when you haven’t neglected any genuine responsibility.
This is why it’s important to examine the circumstances rather than treating the presence of guilt as proof that you’ve made a bad decision.
Consider what you’ve actually done, whether you’ve harmed anybody and whether your decision is consistent with your responsibilities and values.
If you discover that you’ve behaved unfairly, the appropriate response may involve acknowledging that and making amends. If you’ve simply disappointed someone by establishing a reasonable limit, changing your decision to relieve your guilt may reinforce the very expectation you’re trying to reconsider.
And because changing a longstanding pattern often involves discomfort, you may need to tolerate that feeling for a while rather than expecting it to disappear immediately.
How perfectionism affects your relationships
The consequences of perfectionism extend beyond work and personal achievement. They can also shape how you relate to partners, relatives, friends and colleagues, particularly when your sense of worth is closely connected to being responsible, helpful or agreeable.
You take responsibility for other people’s problems
Imagine you’re organising a family gathering.
You arrange the date, prepare the food and try to accommodate everyone’s preferences. Somebody complains about the menu, another person arrives late and a third isn’t happy with the seating arrangements.
You find yourself trying to resolve every complaint, including problems that have very little to do with anything you could reasonably have prevented.
By the end of the day, you’re exhausted and disappointed because the gathering didn’t go exactly as planned.
Other people may appreciate your efforts, but they may also become accustomed to allowing you to manage everything.
When you regularly take responsibility for problems before anybody else has an opportunity to deal with them, you can establish relationships in which your involvement is increasingly expected.
And because you’ve become the person who always takes care of things, stepping away from that role may feel uncomfortable.
You might worry that people will consider you less reliable or that allowing somebody else to take charge will produce a disappointing result.
It’s worth examining whether you’re taking responsibility because you genuinely want to, because the situation requires it or because letting somebody else handle it makes you anxious.
Those motivations can lead to similar behaviour, but they have different implications for your wellbeing.
You avoid disappointing people
Perfectionism can also influence the way you establish boundaries.
If other people’s approval is especially important to your self-esteem, saying no may feel far more difficult than the situation warrants.
You might agree to requests you don’t have time for, avoid expressing disagreement or repeatedly explain your decisions because you want to make sure the other person doesn’t think badly of you.
Eventually, you may begin organising your commitments around preventing disappointment rather than considering what you genuinely want or can reasonably manage.
A useful way to examine this is to imagine that the other person would accept your refusal without any difficulty. Would you still agree to the request?
If your answer changes considerably, fear of disapproval may be playing an important role in your decision.
I’ve written more about this in the best way to stop caring what other people think of you.
An important complication is that other people won’t necessarily welcome the changes you make. Someone who has become accustomed to your constant availability may be disappointed when you start establishing limits.
You’ll still need to consider your actual commitments and whether your decisions are reasonable, but another person’s disappointment doesn’t automatically establish that you’ve behaved badly.
If you’ve spent years trying to ensure that everyone approves of your decisions, accepting that somebody occasionally won’t may require practice.
you hide aspects of yourself that seem unacceptable
Some perfectionists feel a strong need to appear competent, emotionally stable or agreeable.
They may avoid discussing difficulties because they don’t want other people to see them as incapable. They might conceal uncertainty, minimise their problems or remain silent when something bothers them.
Over time, the people around them may become familiar with a carefully maintained version of who they are.
This doesn’t mean that everyone should disclose their vulnerabilities indiscriminately. Privacy and boundaries are important, and there are perfectly legitimate reasons to choose what you share with different people.
But when you consistently avoid showing anything that might compromise the image you’ve established, your relationships can become difficult to experience as genuinely supportive.
You may be admired for your competence while remaining uncertain whether the people close to you would accept you if you needed help.
And because you rarely give them an opportunity to respond to that possibility, the uncertainty remains.
In some relationships, your concerns may be justified. Other people really can be critical, demanding or unreliable. In others, the pressure to maintain an acceptable image may come primarily from your own expectations.
Learning to distinguish between those situations can help you decide where greater openness is appropriate and where firmer boundaries may be necessary.
how to overcome perfectionism without lowering your standards
Changing perfectionistic behaviour requires understanding what maintains it in your particular circumstances.
Someone who spends excessive time checking their work may benefit from establishing clearer criteria for completing tasks. Someone whose principal difficulty involves approval may need to examine why other people’s opinions carry so much weight.
For another person, perfectionism may be closely connected to longstanding beliefs about achievement, responsibility or self-worth.
These patterns can overlap, so it’s often useful to work on several aspects of the problem rather than expecting one exercise to resolve everything.
1. identify the expectation behind your behaviour
Begin by choosing a situation in which you regularly demand more of yourself than seems reasonable.
Perhaps you spend an excessive amount of time preparing for meetings, feel guilty when you rest or struggle to finish something because you’re worried it could be improved.
Try to identify the expectation governing your behaviour.
For example, suppose you believe you must never make mistakes at work. That expectation may feel entirely justified if your professional identity is important to you.
But consider what you believe would happen if you made a minor error.
Would your manager lose confidence in you? Would your colleagues think you were incompetent? Would you begin questioning whether you deserved your position?
Your answers may reveal why an ordinary mistake carries so much emotional significance.
You can then examine whether the feared consequences are realistic, whether you’ve experienced them before and whether you’re applying the same standards to yourself that you’d apply to somebody else.
The purpose isn’t to convince yourself that mistakes never matter. Some errors have serious consequences, and acknowledging that is part of being responsible.
What you’re examining is whether your response is proportionate to the actual situation.
2. decide what the task genuinely requires
Perfectionists can find it difficult to recognise when they’ve done enough because their criteria for completion are often vague.
They want something to be excellent, flawless or beyond criticism.
Unfortunately, these aren’t particularly useful standards when you’re trying to decide whether to finish a task.
Suppose you’re preparing a report. Before beginning, identify the requirements that actually matter: the information needs to be accurate, the conclusions should be supported and the document must be understandable to its intended readers.
Once you’ve met those requirements, you can consider whether further improvements would make a meaningful difference.
The answer will depend on the circumstances.
A report concerning patient safety requires a different level of scrutiny from an informal message about arranging a meeting. The appropriate standard should reflect the consequences of getting something wrong.
You may discover that some of your additional effort is genuinely useful. You may also discover that you’re spending considerable time making corrections that nobody needs and that barely affect the result.
Establishing clear criteria helps you distinguish between improving your work and repeatedly working on it because you feel uncomfortable finishing.
It can also be useful to set reasonable time limits for tasks where the consequences of minor imperfections are low.
If an activity that should take half an hour regularly consumes an entire afternoon, examine how much of that extra time produces a meaningful improvement.
3. test what happens when you respond differently
One of the difficulties with perfectionism is that avoiding mistakes can prevent you from discovering how manageable they might actually be.
If you always check an ordinary email five times, you don’t know what would happen if you checked it once. If you always take responsibility for organising everything, you have little opportunity to discover how other people would manage without your involvement.
Behavioural experiments, commonly used in cognitive behavioural therapy, provide a way of examining these expectations.
You might begin by sending a low-stakes email after one appropriate review, allowing somebody else to organise a minor activity or finishing a task when you’ve met its agreed requirements.
Before making the change, identify what you’re worried will happen. Afterwards, compare your prediction with the actual outcome.
You may discover that nobody notices the difference, that someone makes a minor criticism you can handle or that another person completes a task differently without causing any significant problem.
Of course, an experiment can also reveal that a particular concern was justified. In that case, you can use the information to establish more appropriate standards.
The intention is to develop a more accurate understanding of what different situations require.
Start with situations where the consequences of mistakes are minor. There’s no reason to experiment with responsibilities where an error could cause serious harm.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials found that cognitive behavioural interventions for perfectionism were associated with reductions in perfectionism and some related psychological symptoms. The researchers also noted limitations in the evidence, including the relatively small number of trials and the lack of comparisons with other active treatments.
The findings support the usefulness of working directly on perfectionistic beliefs and behaviours, although the appropriate intervention will depend on the person’s difficulties.
4. learn to tolerate the discomfort of making mistakes
Changing a familiar behaviour can produce anxiety even when you’ve decided that the change is reasonable.
You might finish a task without checking it repeatedly and spend the following hour wanting to open it again. Or you might refuse a request and then feel guilty because somebody seems disappointed.
If you immediately return to your usual behaviour whenever that discomfort appears, you may reinforce the belief that the old strategy is necessary.
Part of the work therefore involves learning to experience uncomfortable emotions without automatically responding in the way you normally would.
This doesn’t mean ignoring important problems or forcing yourself to tolerate overwhelming distress. It means beginning with manageable situations and allowing yourself to discover that discomfort can change without your having to eliminate every possible source of uncertainty.
Suppose you send an ordinary email after checking it once. You feel anxious because you’re worried there might be a mistake.
Rather than reopening it immediately, you could continue with another task and observe what happens to your anxiety.
You might find that the discomfort gradually becomes less intense. You might also discover that the email contains a minor error, in which case you can consider whether it requires correcting.
What matters is developing confidence in your ability to respond to situations as they arise, rather than relying entirely on preventing anything unexpected from happening.
5. distinguish genuine responsibility from unnecessary guilt
If your perfectionism involves trying to meet other people’s expectations, you’ll probably need to examine the guilt you experience when you behave differently.
Imagine you refuse a request because you genuinely don’t have the time or energy to fulfil it.
The other person is disappointed, and you immediately begin questioning your decision.
Before reversing it, consider what responsibility you actually had in the situation.
Had you already made a commitment? Was somebody depending on you to fulfil an obligation? Or were you simply being asked to do something that you were entitled to decline?
These questions help you distinguish between guilt associated with genuine wrongdoing and guilt arising from an internal expectation.
You may discover that you have responsibilities you’ve neglected. If so, acknowledging them is appropriate.
But you may also find that you’ve been treating other people’s preferences as obligations simply because you feel uncomfortable when they’re dissatisfied.
If that’s the case, changing your behaviour will probably involve tolerating some guilt while you develop more realistic expectations.
You can be considerate without accepting every request, just as you can acknowledge somebody’s disappointment without making yourself responsible for eliminating it.
6. change how you evaluate yourself when something goes wrong
Some people believe that harsh self-criticism is necessary to maintain their standards.
They assume that if they stopped being so demanding, they’d become complacent, careless or unmotivated.
It’s worth examining whether their experience actually supports that belief.
Suppose you’ve made a mistake at work.
You could spend the afternoon telling yourself that you’re incompetent and that you should have known better. Alternatively, you could examine what happened, identify what contributed to the error and decide what you need to do differently.
The second approach gives you information that can help improve your performance. The first may produce considerable distress without making the problem any clearer.
A realistic evaluation should allow you to recognise both your mistakes and your achievements.
If you’ve performed badly, there’s no need to pretend otherwise. But a disappointing result doesn’t justify dismissing everything else you’ve accomplished.
You may also benefit from examining how you respond to positive feedback.
When somebody compliments your work, notice whether you immediately dismiss their opinion, explain why the task was easy or identify something that could have been better.
Perhaps the praise is justified.
Allowing yourself to acknowledge that doesn’t mean you’ve abandoned your ambition or become incapable of recognising your limitations.
It means giving your achievements the same consideration you routinely give your mistakes.
7. reconsider your relationship with rest
If you regularly feel guilty when you’re not being productive, it may be useful to establish clearer limits around your responsibilities.
You could decide when your working day ends, protect time for activities you enjoy or accept that certain non-urgent tasks can wait.
Initially, these changes may feel uncomfortable, particularly if you’ve developed a strong association between productivity and being responsible.
You might find yourself calculating what else you could accomplish during your free time or turning leisure activities into another opportunity for self-improvement.
Try paying attention to those expectations without automatically following them.
A walk doesn’t always need to contribute to a fitness goal. Reading a novel doesn’t have to improve your professional knowledge, and spending an afternoon doing very little doesn’t automatically mean you’ve wasted it.
You may discover that allowing yourself time away from your responsibilities helps you return to them with greater energy.
But even when rest doesn’t produce some measurable improvement in your productivity, you’re still entitled to consider whether your expectations about how you use your time are reasonable.
You have a life outside the things you accomplish.
It’s worth allowing some room for it.
a practical exercise to challenge perfectionism
If you want to begin examining your own perfectionistic behaviour, choose one ordinary situation in which your standards seem more demanding than necessary.
The following exercise will help you identify the expectation involved and test whether it’s justified.
Step 1: write down the rule you’re following. Be as specific as possible. For example: I must answer every work message immediately, even when I’m concentrating on something else. A vague statement such as I need to be less demanding won’t give you much information about what to change.
Step 2: identify what you think will happen if you break the rule. Perhaps you’re worried that your colleagues will consider you unreliable. Examine whether immediate availability is genuinely required in your role and whether there’s evidence that responding within a reasonable period would produce the consequences you anticipate.
Step 3: test an appropriate alternative. If your circumstances allow it, try responding to non-urgent messages at designated times rather than interrupting your work whenever one arrives. Observe how you feel, how other people respond and whether the outcome matches your prediction.
If nobody notices the change, that gives you useful information. If someone expresses dissatisfaction, you can consider whether their expectation is reasonable and decide how to respond.
The purpose is to evaluate your standards against what actually happens rather than assuming that every uncomfortable prediction is accurate.
You don’t need to change every aspect of your behaviour at once. Repeatedly experimenting with small, manageable situations can help you recognise which expectations serve a useful purpose and which ones you’ve maintained mainly to avoid criticism, uncertainty or guilt.
when perfectionism requires deeper psychological work
Practical changes can be valuable, but sometimes the problem involves more than checking habits or unrealistic expectations about individual tasks.
Perhaps you’ve spent much of your life understanding yourself as the person who never disappoints anybody. Your family relies on you, your colleagues trust you and your friends expect you to be available whenever they need something.
This identity may provide recognition and a sense of purpose.
But suppose you’re exhausted and begin recognising that you’ve taken on far more than you can reasonably manage.
You decide to reduce your commitments.
From a practical perspective, the changes make sense. Emotionally, however, you may feel that you’re becoming selfish or irresponsible.
You might even wonder who you are if you’re no longer the person everybody can depend on.
In situations like this, perfectionism can become closely connected to a person’s identity and sense of worth.
The expectations they’re trying to change may have helped them obtain affection, recognition or reassurance for many years. Giving up some of those behaviours can therefore involve reconsidering how they understand themselves and their relationships.
Psychological therapy may be useful when perfectionism is causing significant distress or interfering with everyday functioning.
Depending on the person’s needs, therapeutic work can involve identifying perfectionistic beliefs, changing avoidance and checking behaviours, examining the emotional significance of criticism or exploring how particular expectations developed.
A cognitive behavioural approach may focus on the beliefs and behaviours that maintain perfectionism in the present. A psychodynamic approach may explore the experiences and relationships through which demanding expectations acquired their particular emotional meaning. These perspectives can also be integrated when appropriate.
Understanding the origins of a pattern doesn’t automatically change it. Someone may recognise that their fear of criticism is connected to earlier experiences and still feel intensely anxious when their manager points out a mistake.
They may need opportunities to respond differently to criticism while also examining why it affects them so strongly.
Likewise, changing an excessive checking routine may be helpful without resolving the broader belief that their worth depends on being exceptionally competent.
The work involves understanding what perfectionism has come to mean in your particular life and developing other ways of responding to the situations that make those expectations feel necessary.
what changes when perfectionism becomes less demanding?
Reducing perfectionism doesn’t mean you’ll stop caring about your work, become indifferent to criticism or suddenly feel comfortable with every mistake you make.
You’ll probably continue experiencing disappointment when something important doesn’t go as planned. You may also encounter situations where additional preparation, greater effort or closer attention to detail are entirely justified.
What can change is your ability to judge those situations according to their actual requirements.
You might find it easier to finish a task without spending hours making insignificant corrections. Perhaps you become more willing to try something unfamiliar because you’re less concerned about being good at it immediately.
You may also begin noticing when the goals you’re pursuing reflect your own interests and when they’ve been shaped primarily by the desire to gain approval.
Your relationships can change as well. If you become more comfortable establishing reasonable limits, you’ll have greater freedom to decide which responsibilities you want to accept. If you no longer feel compelled to appear competent at all times, you may find it easier to ask for help or discuss difficulties with people you trust.
Some of these changes will involve discomfort, particularly when you begin behaving differently in situations where you’ve followed the same expectations for years.
But they may also allow you to recover time and energy that you’ve been dedicating to preventing mistakes, anticipating criticism or trying to satisfy everybody around you.
And when you accomplish something important, you may find that you can appreciate what you’ve achieved without immediately turning your attention towards everything you could have done better.
you can have high standards without making your life miserable
If you’ve spent years setting demanding expectations for yourself, you may be concerned that changing them will make you less ambitious or less responsible.
That concern deserves examination, particularly if those standards have helped you accomplish things you’re proud of.
But maintaining a demanding expectation simply because you’re frightened of what might happen if you abandon it is different from choosing that expectation because it reflects something important to you.
A person can take their work seriously, fulfil their responsibilities and continue pursuing ambitious goals while recognising that mistakes are sometimes unavoidable.
They can also acknowledge when additional effort has stopped being useful, when a responsibility belongs to somebody else or when the result they’ve achieved is sufficient for the circumstances.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of perfectionism is how easily people can recognise these distinctions when evaluating somebody else’s behaviour.
You probably wouldn’t conclude that a respected colleague was incompetent because they made one minor mistake, or that a friend was irresponsible because they needed a day off.
Yet you might spend an extraordinary amount of time condemning yourself for precisely those things.
If that’s the case, it’s worth examining where your expectations came from, what you believe they protect you from and whether they’re still helping you live the way you want.
You may discover that some of your standards are entirely reasonable and worth maintaining. Others may have become so demanding that satisfying them leaves you with very little opportunity to appreciate your own efforts.
And if you’ve spent years working towards achievements that are supposed to make you feel good enough, only to discover that the satisfaction disappears as soon as you reach them, perhaps the next goal isn’t the problem you need to solve.
Perhaps it’s time to examine the rules you’ve established for deciding when you’re allowed to feel satisfied.
If you recognise yourself in these patterns, subscribe to Gangatu’s newsletter. I write about the psychological mechanisms behind our behaviour, the expectations we rarely question and the decisions we make without always understanding why.
You might discover that some of the things you’ve spent years calling being responsible deserve a rather closer look.
