Many people joke about perfectionism and say things like, “I am just a perfectionist, I can’t stand getting a less than perfect score on tests.” And many people look at this mind set as a good thing and all it means is that people are working extra hard at succeeding but what those individuals that are of this mindset need to remember is that being perfect is not worth losing their happiness within life.
This might sound a little dramatic for the topic but people that actually suffer from true perfectionism are plagued with seeing life as an endless report card of judgments, and this can quickly lead to other psychological issues such as depression and eating disorders. Not only can perfectionism hurt an individual, it can trickle into the lives of their peers and loved ones of the original afflicted people.
This makes perfectionism a toxic mind set in more ways than one, it can easily be passed on to the children of individuals with this mindset through over aggressive parenting methods or through aspirations of peers at the workplace. Everyone has had that friend growing up, parents demanding absurdly high goals from their only human children, leading to high stress levels at an early age. And who doesn’t want to be successful in the work place? When peers aspire to become the next golden child of the company it can get away from most people and lead to absurdly high stress levels for no truly meaningful reason.
What is Perfectionism?
Perfectionism is a form of anxiety that can easily consume your life if you do not find time to decompress and discharge all of the stress of the work day. Perfectionism often stems from childhood pressures such as parents pushing children into rigorous extra curricula’s or demanding straight A’s in already advanced courses.
Eventually, the stressful demands of the parents may pay off, and this is when it can become a disorder. The child’s only source of praise is when he or she completes these goals. This can lead to an “I achieve, therefore I am” attitude, and soon nothing like the thrill of impressing others or themselves will be comparable, leading to obsession of the desire to succeed and the fear of the repercussions of not living up to expectations.
Most people that live with perfectionism know that it may be a problem within their everyday lives. These people understand it is something they are living with but just consider it the price they pay to become successful. In fact, many of the great athletes, entrepreneurs, and business men and women of our time were perfectionists and knew it. It is important to remember however that striving for difficult goals and working hard is not always classified as perfectionism, it is just important to remember to not let an overactive work ethic control your life and cause major stress in your life that is otherwise avoidable.
Anxiety Disorders
For instance, perfectionism can easily run hand-in-hand with another anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder. Imagine you are trying to get ready for a night out with friends, but you just cannot get your tie tied right, or you keep making mistakes while doing your makeup. A person that suffers from perfectionism and/or OCD will not leave the house until it is perfect, often being hours late or missing the night out altogether. This leads to damaging relationships and depression more often than not.
Some good and bad examples of perfectionism can be found all around us and in people we may admire for achievements, such as Steve Jobs or Serena Williams. People like Steve Jobs in the corporate world can lean towards being perfect but no one has ever come close to Steve’s level of perfectionism.
Steve Jobs sometimes would sacrifice an immense amount of company money just for something so simple as how many colors should be in the company logo. Or how the development took three years just because he did not like the idea of an internal fan, or how he had his employees redesign the motherboard because it did not look elegant.
Did Steve Jobs waste his company’s money? Or did he bring Apple up to become one of the most successful computer companies in the world? Ultimately he did both, while it was a struggle to meet his rigorous demands he did give Apple a strong reputation and turned his company into a powerhouse after being fired from his own company, almost destroying his family, and not being very well liked for a long time.
Despite his big achievements, Job’s was known to have high stress levels, a quick temper and for often being completely rude and mean for no apparent reason — showing some of the negative side to having a perfectionist mindset.
Reasons Why Perfectionism is Unhealthy
Ever felt pressured to complete a task before a deadline? Ever felt like you just wanted to give up on everything just because you cannot complete an assignment? It seems silly to worry like that to most, but to those that suffer with perfectionism or obsessive compulsive disorder, those feelings are an every-and-all-day struggle. Most people do not stress the small things in life and just go about their days relatively worry free, but for those who struggle with these anxieties every day can be a time crunch, deadline and a tryout; not to mention all the stress and frustration that comes with it which is bound to effect friends and family.
Permanent Stress
Constant stress and anxiety has been known to cause health problems and affect many different aspects of people’s lives. It affects the body in a very bad way. It can even be detected in behavior and in mood tendencies. The effects on the body alone are what can instigate most of the other problems. Everything from lack of sleep, change in sex drive, headaches, and chest pains to an upset stomach can be caused by stress.
These problems can compound into other issues, such as irritability, depression, anger and restlessness. This can affect you and your life in so many more ways than is apparent. For instance, people just are naturally self-centered and may not pick up on the fact that you have been having a hard time dealing with stress and anxiety and just outcast you as mean or unpleasant person, further leading to anxiety and stress.
Bad Habits
Drug & Alcohol Abuse
Perfectionism can also make it very easy to fall into a laundry list of bad habits, some of the most noteworthy being alcoholism, drug abuse and eating disorders. Probably the most notorious being alcoholism, jobs that have incredibly high stress levels often can produce many cases of alcoholism and drug abuse.
Not surprisingly careers where you might find a lot of perfectionists you can also find a lot of alcohol and drug abuse, jobs such as doctors, airline pilots, lawyers and air traffic controllers. In these kinds of jobs there is a big need to be incredibly precise, or push high stress levels on people who are in charge of hundreds of lives throughout their daily work routine.
These stress levels combined with drug and alcohol abuse can cause complications in later life and can make people fall into a bad spiral of either unhealthy stress relief, or complex depressions that begin to control and corrupt people’s lives. Now, remember next time you are feeling stressed about a deadline or getting something absolutely perfect just take a step back and breath and remember that you are alive and there are so many happy things to look forward too, because being perfect is just not worth being miserable.
How to Overcome Perfectionism
Being a perfectionist can be an exhausting and stressful thing. On the outside it might seem better then failure but really it leads to negativity. A negative view of you and even a negative view of others due to the perfectionism can be rampant. Overcoming perfectionism can be challenging but it is the best thing you can do for your health and overall happiness. Not only that, in the end you will feel much more successful and satisfied.
The following are a few things you can do to overcome perfectionism:
Identify the reasons why you are a perfectionist
— learning why you are, or have become, a perfectionist is the main way to figure out how not to be. Once you learn the reasons you can find a way to avoid them. If you became a perfectionist because you are afraid of failure then you need to put yourself in a position to fail so you can learn from it and realize it’s not all that bad. You need to identify whether the reasons you are a perfectionist actually help you achieve the goals you have set out for yourself in the first place.
Learn how to let go
— Holding onto what you have done wrong and the areas you need to fix is only causing more stress. It’s okay to have some flaws and it’s also okay to work on you. When you take it too far and never accomplish any tasks is when it becomes negativity. Negative thoughts only lead to sadness, learn to let go of the thoughts so you can become happier and less stressed. If you find yourself stressing over a particular part at your job see if you can give that work to someone else. Control does not always mean you will be successful, and giving up might just be the best thing you can do for your health.
Learn to love yourself as is
— having flaws is not a bad thing. It’s what makes you unique and different from everyone else. That doesn’t mean you can’t strive to be the best you. It just means to accept the things you can’t change about yourself. If you just finished a project or task, stop thinking about all the things you did wrong. Instead, think about all the things you did right. If you laugh too much when you talk to others, or forgot a line during a speech, at least you accomplished it and did it by being you.
Reward yourself
— Even if you failed, you should reward yourself. Take notice in the things that you did do successfully and even unsuccessfully. Change those negative thoughts into positive thoughts so you can continue to be less anxious about the things you have done. A good quote to go by comes from Thomas A. Edison. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
As you can see, overcoming perfectionism is all about letting go and learning to love yourself. Because you are human you will make a mistake and that is ok. As long as you continue to go for your goals, no matter the outcome, things will be okay. You must let go and reward yourself for any outcome. Pushing through and doing the work to get where you want, even if failure happens, is enough work to get a reward.
Why Failure is Okay
As a perfectionist, your biggest fear is failure. Most perfectionists find that they are contently redoing projects or tasks because they don’t want to fail at it. They will find any mistake they can and fix it, all to avoid failure. The cold hard truth, though, is that failure is inevitable. In fact, the constant need to fix things, and correct things often actually leads right to what you fear most. Failure. Not finishing. The truth is, no matter how perfect you are, at some point in your life you will failure. That does not mean it is the end of the world. Not all failure ends in catastrophe. In fact, most failure is a valuable lesson in life.
The following are a few reasons why failure is okay:
You learn valuable lessons
— Failure can teach you where you need improvements. Needing to improve your work is not always a negative thing. It allows you to grow and get more education and push yourself to the next level. If you never experience being uncomfortable, you can’t improve.
You become stronger
— Take that failure and use it to your advantage. Don’t run away. Try to use it to become stronger. You might feel knocked down for a while, but get up and push through and you’ll become even better than before.
You become fearless
— once you have failed then you know what it’s like, you’ll be shocked at how much this will calm your fears. It’s taking your fear head on that will move you past it. Having experienced failure allows you to take chances and go even deeper than before. It’ll make you fearless because you’ve already experienced it. Most times failure only leads to you becoming a better person. Psychologists have said they only way you can get passed a fear is if you face it directly. It’s just like knowing how to beat a competitor. To beat someone you have to know how they do things so that way you can counteract and succeed.
Makes success even better
— without failure, success wouldn’t feel so great. You wouldn’t even know what to strive for in the first place. Failure allows you to push through and learn from your mistakes so you are better the next time. So that way you know what to do to be successful. Once you accomplish that, success will feel even better because you know you really pushed yourself.
Don’t be mistaken. Failure may feel pretty bad when it hits. You took all that time and energy just to fail, so it can become a little upsetting. Just remember, though, that failure is never constant. You can take that failure and learn from it. Use it to find the areas you can fix improve upon next time. The real success in failure though is in finishing. When you let procrastination get in the way of experiencing anything you are likely never finishing anything to experience either success or failure. In the end, failure only makes success that much greater. You can only know how to succeed once you know what failure feels like.
In the end, when someone is a perfectionist they strive to be the absolute best, which is impossible. Even very successful people, like Steve Jobs for example, aren’t perfect. They make mistakes. They have faults. The trick is they try. They move forward and don’t let perfectionism get in the way of life.
Perfectionism can lead to stress and anxiety because you’re trying to make everything perfect, which, doesn’t even exist in the real world. Imagine a woman who wants to and needs to lose 100 pounds. When she loses 100 pounds, more than likely she will have extra skin that may only be removed with surgery. Should she just not lose weight, improve her health, just because of the skin problem? No, of course not.
It may sound crazy but perfectionism can be extremely unhealthy. It may seem positive on the surface because they are striving for success but it can lead ultimately to OCD, drug abuse, sleep deprivation, stress, anxiety and even depression. Perfectionism also causes people to often be late or note even show up to their job because they are ultimately afraid of failure. Imagine the man who wants to ask his crush out on a date but each day he wakes up he doesn’t like how he looks. He keeps putting off asking her because his looks aren’t perfect. Eventually, his crush is engaged to someone else. He completely missed out due to not taking the chance.
To prevent these sad and unnecessary outcomes you can easily overcome perfectionism by following a few steps. First, you must identify the reason you have become a perfectionist and work through it. You also need to learn to let go. If you find yourself obsessing over something, move on or give that task to someone else. Outsourcing or delegating triggering tasks is a good idea because there is no point in suffering if you can avoid it. For example, maybe you procrastinate on filing because you simply hate it. Why do it? Let someone else do it. There are no rewards in heaven for being a martyr.
Learn to love yourself. Finding ways to reward yourself even if you fail is important too. That is because you are identifying that being perfect isn’t always necessary. This is a good thing. Perfect is boring anyway. You’re far more interesting being your messy self.
Failure is not always a bad thing and doesn’t always lead to an awful outcome. In fact, it teaches you treasured lessons in life that will help you become a stronger and more educated person. Without failure, you won’t even know how to succeed. In fact, if you are procrastinating a lot you are likely at a standstill in life and not experiencing either success or failure.
However, you may be expecting more failure than you need to though, due to lack of finished projects or attempts to do something interesting. It helps you step outside of the box and accomplish more tasks even if you don’t do them perfectly. Many times in life, done is better than not done and no one else is even going to notice the small things you perceive as being wrong. If you have a fear of failure then you need to experience it heads on.
Don’t get mistaken, though, striving to be your best self does not mean you are a perfectionist. Striving for the best is not negative, it’s when you get to the point you obsess over certain things to the point where it prevents you from finishing a task or being happy is when you should be worried and take steps to overcome procrastination.
