5 Things You Don’t Know About Perfectionism

And you might be falling into its trap.

Being a recovering perfectionist, perfectionism is a topic close to my heart.

I can talk about it all day, but I also know that many people don’t take perfectionism seriously, thinking it’s just an inconvenience for the privileged few. Namely, those over-achievers among us who are “hard on themselves”.

Or, if they are perfectionists themselves, they may be proud of their perfectionism like I did and aren’t willing to see the heavy costs involved. And they think they’ll lose their ‘edge’ and their hunger for achievements if they give it up.

However, perfectionism is more common than you think — I would argue that we are all perfectionists to varying degrees — and it can be just as damaging as many other compulsive behaviours.

According to Wikipedia, perfectionism is a risk factor for eating disorders, social anxiety and phobia, workaholism, substance abuse, self-harm, depression as well as physical problems like chronic stress and heart disease.

That’s quite an impressive list, so it’s important to learn more about perfectionism — for non-perfectionists and perfectionists alike — so we or our loved ones don’t unwittingly fall into its trap.

To get you started, here are five key things you need to know about perfectionism:

1. Perfectionism is Not Striving for Excellence

On of the most pervasive myths of perfectionism is the confusion between excellence and perfection.

While striving for excellence, or achieving high standards is perfectly — no pun intended — fine as it drives us to do the best we could, perfection doesn’t actually exist in real life, no matter how much we emotionally want or need it.

Therefore, it’s hard to achieve those standards consistently (if ever!), and you end up beating yourself up for your perceived mistakes and failures. What’s more, instead of blaming the strict and impossible standards, you think the solution is to try harder next time. It then becomes a never-ending pursuit of a prize that seems ever-so-slightly out of reach.

Indeed, excellence involves enjoying what you are doing and feeling good about what you have achieved. You derive joy from both the process and the outcome. It helps you to develop self-confidence naturally over time.

Perfection, on the other hand, involves always finding faults and feeling bad about anything less than an 100. It doesn’t matter how well you are doing or how much you have achieved.

Put it another way, perfectionism goes beyond striving for excellence to feeling nothing is ever good enough.

2. Perfectionism Leads You to Only Two Destinations

Perfectionism often leads to two seemingly contradictory behaviours: hyper-activity or paralysis. In other words, over-achieving or procrastination.

First, it causes you to constantly strive and achieve. In particular, perfectionists have a tendency to focus on their work, as it’s the area of their life over which they seem to have the most control. Therefore, many perfectionists are also workaholics, and vice versa.

However, lurking in the shadow are their deep-seated fears of not being good enough or not having what it takes to succeed and they end up feeling paralysed, stuck in inaction or procrastination.

3. It Creates a Fight-Flight-Freeze Stress Response

Perfectionists engage in a stress response of either fight, flight, or freeze (and often swing between them).

With the fight response, a perfectionist engages in endless activities to keep improving, people pleasing, and perfecting their work, relationships or life in general in order to live up to the strict standards they have for themselves (or others have for them).

However, the activities they are engaged in and the goals they’re striving for often have little or no personal value to them, so they don’t derive any lasting satisfaction from them. They’re also in such a rush to get to the proverbial top of the mountain that they never pause long enough to enjoy their journey along the way.

Their determination (or stubbornness, depending on your point of view) to get things done at all costs means they find it hard to quit, sticking with things, jobs, relationships long past their due date.

There is a term for it and it’s called “completion compulsion” — they feel compelled to complete whatever they started, even if they don’t enjoy it or the costs actually outweigh the benefits.

In short, perfectionism turns people into success slaves.

4. Laziness Has Nothing to Do with Procrastination

“Perfectionism is the mother of procrastination” — Michael Hyatt

On the other hand, they may end up resorting to the flight or freeze stress response and become paralysed with inaction. It is fear that causes stress, which then lead to procrastination, not laziness or incompetence.

For example, most procrastinators I know — including my former self — are busy people constantly on the go. We do and accomplish a lot, except for the one or two things we really, really want to do.

In othr words, we do a lot of busywork — work that makes us feel busy and productive but don’t contribute to our big goals and dreams — instead of work that really matters to us (the actual goals and dreams themselves!).

Our fears of failure and of judgment mean that we get sweaty palms and heart palpitations just thinking about our big and audacious goals, and we’d rather go for things that are urgent rather than important.

5. Perfectionism Turns Procrastination into A Virtue

Not only does perfectionism causes stress, overwhelm and anxiety, it also turns procrastination into a virtue.

After all, we can comfort ourselves that we are waiting for the “right” time or conditions, and our high standards mean we can’t just “settle”. Never mind such time or conditions never exist in reality and settling isn’t such a bad thing sometimes.

So, we keep waiting, planning, organising, preparing and learning. Yet, we never pull the trigger. It’s a behaviour I had struggled with personally and for years I considered myself the queen of procrastination and I hid behind learning and studying, instead of doing and actually putting myself out there.

For example, I’ve harboured a secret desire to write a book since I was young. But I was too scared that I didn’t have “what it takes” and worried about what everyone would think (i.e. fear of failure and fear of judgment), that it took me more than 20 years before I actually started writing my first book. I kept reading books on writing and attending workshops on writing, but I didn’t write.

Twenty years is a long time, even for a late bloomer like myself. While I did a lot of the things I wanted to do earlier in life such as building my career and travelling, but I kept procrastinating on the one thing that really mattered to me.

I finally got over myself and wrote my first book two years ago. And I’m writing my second book now instead of waiting for another twenty years!

Rejecting the Illusion of Perfectionism

A year from now you will wish you had started today.” — Karen Lamb

Ultimately, we need to reject both over-achieving (and it’s variant, workaholism) and procrastination because they do us more harm than good.

Over-achieving is relentlessly stressful and can easily lead to burnout and depression, while procrastination destroys our productivity, and in the end, our dreams and our happiness.

And please, please don’t wait until you’re “ready”. I didn’t feel ready when I finally decided to write my first book. And I don’t feel ready now I’m writing my second book.

Just between you and me, I’d probably never feel ready. Ever.

But that’s okay. The truth is, we learn how to do something by doing it, not by waiting for perfection.

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Annie is an ICF-certified life coach and the author of Brave Again.