Ellen Hendriksen is a clinical psychologist and anxiety specialist at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University. Her work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Observer, New York Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Scientific American, and Psychology Today, among many other publications.
What’s the big idea?
A degree of perfectionism brings with it admirable qualities, but taken too far, perfectionism can become maladaptive. Our demanding culture is silently fueling an epidemic of unhealthy perfectionism. Many people who look like they’re hitting it out of the park feel like they are striking out. Fortunately, through practices of self-acceptance, all of us with perfectionism can keep our standards high without losing our personal sense of worth.
Below, Ellen shares five key insights from her new book, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists. Listen to the audio version—read by Ellen herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Perfectionism is about never feeling good enough.
I see a silent epidemic of perfectionism. The majority of my clients have perfectionism at the center of the Venn diagram of their challenges, but no one ever comes in for therapy and says, “Ellen, I’m a perfectionist. I need everything to be perfect.” Instead, they say things like:
- “I feel like I’m always failing.”
- “I feel like I’m falling behind—I should be so much further ahead in life than I am now.”
- “I have a million things on my plate and I’m not doing any of them well.”
The term perfectionism is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not about striving to be perfect; it’s about never feeling good enough. Those of us with perfectionism do a lot of things well. Our high standards and hard work pay off. We may get flattering compliments. We’re seen as successful, accomplished, impressive. But that’s not how we feel.
Behind the scenes, despite our eagle-eyed inner quality-control inspectors ensuring that we do things well and correctly, we fear getting judged, criticized, or making mistakes. We set high, personally demanding standards for ourselves, which is great—please keep doing that—but then, here’s the problem: we stake our worth on reaching those standards. When we inevitably don’t reach our unrealistic standards, we feel like we’ve failed. Over time, we rack up a lot of perceived failures, which makes us feel chronically dissatisfied, isolated, or burned out. In short, we look like we’re hitting it out of the park, but we feel like we’re striking out.
It doesn’t just come from within but from all around us. In an ever-more competitive, ratings-oriented, optimization-focused culture, it feels like the stakes are high. Especially among young people, there is pressure to say things the right way, do things the right way, and accomplish the right things, or there will be dire social consequences: criticism, rejection, abandonment, and shame. A mistake caught on social media will be amplified to the world with a click. In a demanding culture with little room for error, it makes sense that we respond by feeling that we are not good enough.
2. The heart of perfectionism is overevaluation.
Perfectionism can be beneficial. Adaptive perfectionism is when we strive for excellence, do good work for the sake of the work, set high standards, and care deeply. These are wonderful qualities. In fact, perfectionism supports a personality trait called conscientiousness, which is a tendency to do things well and thoroughly, be responsible, and be diligent. As personality traits go, conscientiousness is the one to choose for a good life.
However, we can slip into maladaptive perfectionism, also known as clinical perfectionism, which, according to the research of Drs. Roz Shafran, Zafra Cooper, and Christopher Fairburn, is based on two pillars. The first is self-criticism, marked by harsh and personal criticism. The second is overevaluation, which equates our self-worth with our performance. We all experience this to some degree; we feel proud when we succeed and disappointed when we fail. However, in overevaluation, we believe we must perform at the highest level possible to consider ourselves adequate.
“As personality traits go, conscientiousness is the one to choose for a good life.”
Examples include the student who derives personal value from their grades, the employee who sees their quarterly evaluation as a referendum on their character, or the athlete who is only as good as their last game. We can overevaluate anything: how healthy we ate today, whether we were awkward at the holiday party, or how good a parent we were today. Our self-worth is contingent upon our performance.
Additional tendencies come packaged with overevaluation and self-criticism to complete clinical perfectionism. One is a focus on flaws and details. We zero in on the one frowning face in the crowd of smiles or the crumbs on the counter in an otherwise clean kitchen. Second, we evaluate our performance, and by extension, ourselves, as all or nothing. We set the bar for “adequate” at “flawless,” so if we make a mistake, screw up, or struggle, we flip from all to nothing. One cookie ruins our healthy eating for the day, making a mistake at work means we’re terrible at our job and will be fired, or one fight means our relationship is doomed to break up.
3. You don’t have to lower your standards to roll back perfectionism.
Imperfection is having a moment in our culture, which is fantastic, but the advice about how to allow imperfection can be misguided. “You have to lower your standards” or “stop when things are good enough” doesn’t go over well with people who have perfectionism.
The problem isn’t high standards; the problem is overevaluation. If our worth is contingent upon our performance, of course, we won’t lower our standards. We won’t settle for subpar or mediocre outcomes because that would mean we’re subpar or mediocre. So please keep your high standards!
Instead, work on separating worth from performance. This isn’t a complete separation (of course, we’re proud of good outcomes and frustrated when we don’t meet expectations), but let’s shift our worth and performance so they’re not totally overlapping.
“He was focused on information, not evaluation.”
I tell a story in the book about Kareem Abdul Jabbar and his time at UCLA with the legendary coach John Wooden. The team’s record was so impressive that two researchers, Drs. Roland Tharp and Ronald Gallimore, observed practices during the 1974 to 1975 season to study what Coach Wooden did. They discovered that he seldom praised or criticized his players. Instead, as a former high school teacher, he just taught. He said what to do and how to do it. He was focused on information, not evaluation.
We can all shift from evaluation to information. Take the stance of a sculptor eyeing a block of marble. What would make this work better? What would be helpful for the work? Evaluative self-talk is personal, general, and permanent (“I’m so stupid”), while task-focused self-talk is external, specific, and fixable (“Pass the ball to someone short”).
For example, I had a client studying violin performance who would mercilessly criticize herself in the practice room. So, we worked on shifting her self-talk from statements like “Why can’t I do this? What is wrong with me?” to “Try it with a slow metronome” or “One measure at a time.” Keep high standards, but shift from evaluation to information so you can strive for excellent work for the sake of excellence.
4. Change your relationship to self-criticism.
Self-criticism is the core of humans’ ability to self-regulate. A healthy dose of self-judgment helps us evaluate and modify our behavior and ultimately get along harmoniously with fellow humans. Evolutionarily, we critique ourselves to better ourselves.
But in perfectionism, self-criticism can overgrow its usefulness. Perfectionistic self-criticism can be a harsh and painful experience that, experienced over and over, makes us feel inadequate, incapable, or like a failure. Consider, however, that those of us with perfectionism are conscientious. We take things seriously, meaning we also take self-critical thoughts seriously—even literally.
Rather than trying to stop criticizing ourselves, which is akin to fighting biology and evolution, we can change our relationship to self-criticism. Enter a technique called cognitive defusion, which detangles us from our thoughts. It emphasizes that our self-criticisms are thoughts—not reality or truth.
“Part of true self-acceptance is realizing this is just what my brain does.”
A fan-favorite cognitive defusion method is to play with our self-critical thoughts and make them a little bit ridiculous or irreverent. For example, I have a client who likes to picture Animal from The Muppets beating his drums and yelling his thought, which is, “Everyone will judge you.” I have another client whose thought is, “You’re going to let everyone down” and she has made up a little tune and sings the thought to herself. Self-critical thoughts won’t go away, but we can engage with them differently.
For me, I try to live by self-acceptance. Part of true self-acceptance is realizing this is just what my brain does. Just like some brains are wired to be optimistic or pessimistic, or introverted or extroverted, some brains are wired to be self-critical. But that doesn’t mean that the self-critical thoughts my brain generates are true, nor do I need to change myself. Thoughts can just float by like the music at a coffee shop. It’s there. I can hear it. But I don’t have to sing along. I don’t have to get wrapped up in it or take it as truth.
5. Perfectionism is an interpersonal problem.
Perfectionism is what researchers call interpersonally motivated, meaning it’s trying to help us belong to the tribe. But perfectionism takes us down the wrong path: it tells us we have to perform as superbly as possible for people to like us. We have to be good at things in order to belong.
But think about why your friends are your friends. Are you friends with them because they’re good at things? Do you like them because they’re skilled at conversation, or they always pick a good restaurant, or they’re one of the fastest runners you know? None of those things are bad, but I’m guessing those are not at the core of why you like them. More likely, you choose your friends because of how they make you feel—connected, supported, understood.
Perfectionism tells us to engage in perfectionistic self-presentation, meaning to show only what’s going well and hide problems and shortcomings. We try to keep ourselves socially safe by putting our best foot forward and hiding the mess, but then we come across as superhuman, unrelatable, or intimidating, which keeps us from connecting deeply and authentically.
Ironically, letting people see some of the mess helps us connect with others. Vulnerability is a willingness to reveal thoughts, actions, and emotions that might result in criticism or rejection and a leap of faith that they won’t. Think of the word literally: vulnerable means being at risk. We put ourselves at risk when we disclose something vulnerable.
But being vulnerable with people we want to be closer to signals two things. First, it shows that we trust them not to judge or reject us when we tell them about our weaknesses or ask for help. Bonus: our trusting disclosures often elicit reciprocal “me too!” sharing, which brings people closer. Second, vulnerability signals that you don’t consider yourself better or more advanced. Instead of a teacher/student relationship or a mentor/mentee relationship, it signals that you are equals, which is the foundation of close, trusting bonds.
To listen to the audio version read by author Ellen Hendriksen, download the Next Big Idea App today:
