Perfectionism Is Ruining Your Life (What to Do About It)

so I want you to meet two hypothetical students we've got Harry and Percy now both Harry and Percy are ambitious and conscientious and hardworking they enjoy cting goals for themselves and they feel motivated when they make progress towards them but when they get feedback on their work they react quite differently Harry appreciates constructive criticism and he's willing to learn from his mistakes but Percy only sees this feedback as a failure Percy holds himself to excessively high standards he's ashamed of his mistakes and he worries a lot about what others around him will think now the

key difference between these two students is that Harry is is a healthy striber and pery on the other hand is a perfectionist so if you're anything like me you can probably relate to this feeling of perfectionism and feeling this need to be perfect in the things that we do and I recently had a really interesting conversation about perfectionism with Professor Thomas current who is a world leading expert on perfectionism at the London School of Economics perfectionism is not kind of a black or white it's not I am a perfectionist or you aren't a perfectionist but

it's really you know where we sit on the perfectionism spectrum and some of us will be more perfectionist IC on that Spectrum some will be a little less most will be in the middle and the big contribution I think of my work is showing that that middle bit of the perfectionism Spectrum where most of us sit is slowly creeping upwards and we're seeing growing levels of perfectionism over time particularly among young people so in this video we're going to go through why being a perfectionist is generally not actually a good thing and then in the

second part of the video we're going to look at some of the ways that we can overcome perfectionism and strive towards being more like a healthy striving Harry and less like a perfectionist Percy now on the surface it's easy to assume that perfectionism leads to increased productivity and more success compared to those people who don't see themselves as perfectionists but this is not true at all Serena Williams Victoria Pendleton Steve Jobs Demi lvat you know all these people who self-confessed Perfection made it to the top of their professions clearly really talented and high achieving and

therefore it must be the perfectionism that that propelled them there when we look at the data however we find no relationship between perfectionism and performance and this is really curious because they work so hard they put everything into their activities and yet they don't seem to perform any better why is that so to help explain this let's look at this study of student athletes which involved cycling trials the students were split up into two groups now within this group of students some of them had high levels of perfectionism directed towards themselves and the rest didn't

based on a survey that they did at the start and all these students were told to cycle for 6 minutes and to try to beat their personal best time but the researchers in the study were very sneaky and so by manipulating the information that was shown to the students on the screen the test was set up in a way that ensured that everyone would fail to meet their personal targets now the students were then asked to try the trial for a second time and the really interesting thing was that the students who had high levels

of perfectionism did not try as hard on the second round or in other words after their first failure their effort actually decreased whereas for the group that had the non-perfectionists in it their effort stayed the same so this can be explained by the fact that perfectionists find it really hard when things start to go wrong which then translates into behaviors that avoid further failure otherwise known as procrastination so being a perfectionist tends not to actually make you perform better it tends to make you perform worse if you've had a setback but then the second reason

why perfectionism is not associated with better performance is because although perfectionists tend to work very hard they probably work too hard and this means that they often tend to start making compromises in their life like it's very easy to miss a few hours of sleep just to work on an assignment to try and make it perfect or spending way too much time on that presentation at work to make it that much better but ultimately even though this might look good on paper these sacrifices are what lead a perfectionist towards less productivity less success and way

more burnout okay so now let's talk about the perfectionism trap now in my conversation with Thomas he really emphasized where perfectionism stems from and how it traps us in a negative spiral of Decline and self-defeat it comes from a place of deficit it's a sense that I must move through the world proving to other people that I'm good enough so in order to do that I must Excel I must be perfect I must have high standards okay but what we're doing is we're setting ourselves up for failure because those excessive standards are too high so

when perfectionists set their standards really high it means that there is a higher chance that those standards are not met or in other words failure this failure then causes feelings of Shame and guilt and anxiety and stress and low self-esteem which means they overcompensate by setting themselves even higher standards next time and this Spiral goes on and on getting worse and worse each time and this can actually be really hard for a perfectionist to escape from and It ultimately stems from this deficit thinking or feeling like you are not enough if on the other hand

you are a healthy striver and you're trying to set a new squat personal best in the gym for example then you'll enjoy the process of trying to get there and you'll enjoy the process even on the days where you feel like you're a lot weaker than in your last gym session whereas as a perfectionist you'll probably set a new personal best goal that is well beyond your means and you'll feel like a failure every time you can't lift that weight or when you see someone else squatting a much heavier weight than you now one fun

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among perfectionists particularly perfectionists that have come from you know I've come from a working class background into a middle class world and you often doubt yourself you wonder if you deserve to be there you wonder if your works of a certain standard you look around and see people are doing so much better than you or how you think are doing so much better than you and you and you think inside I have to prove every day that I'm good enough that I deserve to be here and that I'm trying to disguise this kind of flawed

and inadequate person that I think I am inside so imposter syndrome correlates with what we call socially prescribed perfectionism more so than self-oriented perfectionism so when I say I'm not good enough or I need to be better this is self-oriented perfectionism whereas socially prescribed perfectionism originates in a social environment that is highly expectant so I would say everyone around me wants me to get this new job or I cannot fail this exam and let my family down there are other people's expectations on me and this socially prescribed perfectionism can come from those around you like

work colleagues and teachers and parents and basically everyone you interact with but it's also important to be aware that we do live unfortunately in a highly competitive Society it's a society that's designed to make us feel deficient in some way and therefore cultivates this feeling of perfectionism so it can be really hard to escape these feelings of needing to be perfect for those around you and as with all of these things a classic culprate is social media now research shows that when perfectionists compare themselves to others who seem better than them on social media they

feel less satisfied and confident in their own life and this is what researchers call upward social comparison which leads to higher levels of dissatisfaction and lower levels of confidence but thankfully this story does have a more positive side because there are many ways that we can try and overcome perfectionism which is what we're going to talk about in the second half of this video tip number one set reasonable standards and start somewhere and so Thomas talks about setting reasonable standards here in the context of writing an essay I just say just get just just write

something write a letter to your mom like just get words on a on a on a on a computer screen and start the process it doesn't even have to be related to the task at hand because if you can start writing it's a nice note to your mom but also it gets you in that kind of frame of mind where you're putting words on paper and then begin and then you know like you say it doesn't have to be uh you don't even have to consult the literature just put down your thoughts on this particular

topic right and then begin to iterate now there's a concept in economics that is directly related to what we're talking about here the law of diminishing returns this means that up to a certain point there is an increase in output with increasing input or effort but after that point called the point of diminishing returns the increases in output grow smaller and smaller with the same increase in input there also comes a point where outputs start to even decline the point of negative returns and this applies perfectly to working hours for example like let's say you're

working 40 hours a week at your job or your studies or whatever the thing might be those first 40 hours are probably going to be more effective than the next 40 hours like your 80th hour is probably not going to be anywhere near as productive as your 20th hour because you're just getting tired and actually if you keep working past the 90th and the 100th hour you'll probably get to a point of negative returns I.E you'll be doing actively bad work rather than very good work and so if you're a perfectionist then you might often

find yourself in that dangerous territory past the point of diminishing and maybe even negative returns and that's why it's always important to set our standards to a reasonable level and not set them too high and the way I like to think of this is basically lower the bar whenever I feel like I'm procrastinating or feeling too perfectionist about something I remind myself I have to lower the bar and this sounds bad it sounds like oh my God you're embracing mediocrity it's like yes I am embracing mediocrity because otherwise I would allow perfect to be the

enemy of good perf ISM and procrastination would then hold me back now there's two main reasons why you should lower the bar and just set reasonable standards rather than high standards the first one is that if you don't set your standards too high to begin with then it's a lot easier to start now when it comes to procrastination as I've written about in my book and talked about at norum by the way you should check out my book if you haven't already link down below and if you have please leave an Amazon review LOL anyway

we know from all this stuff that like getting started with things is often the hardest part procrastination is a problem with getting started rather than a problem with doing the thing once you've gotten started and perfectionism often leads to procrastination because perfectionists are so afraid of failure and would much prefer to avoid failing and so they don't even start in the first place therefore what we do is we lower our standards we lower the bar and that lets us simply start somewhere and reason number two for lowering your standards is that if you set reasonable

standards rather than very high standards you will also lower the risk of burnout and so really the way we do this is that for whatever we're working on we try and establish the standard of good enough like what does good enough mean to you in this specific case and then once you've met your expectations of the task and you have satisfed ified your level of good enough then you can stop and move on to something else now it is okay sometimes to set your expectations a little higher and to enter the zone of diminishing returns

because sometimes you do want to challenge yourself and go above and beyond what's expected of you but it's important to remember that a we can't do this with everything so we shouldn't try because that's a recipe for Burnout and B especially if you're new to something or you have a tendency to procrastinate on the thing high standards are actually holding you back rather than serving you in that context by the way one of my favorite things to do to overcome these sorts of negative feelings that lead to things like procrastination and perfection m is journaling

and because I'm weird I like to collect journaling prompts and journaling methods and because people always ask me about it I've put them all into this journaling Hub which is completely free for you to access it'll be linked down below you just put in your email and then you'll get linked to this like massive database of journaling prompts and every time I come up with a new prompt or discover a new prompt I added to the database it's completely free you might as well it's linked down below all right so tip number two for overcoming

perfectionism is surrendering and simply letting life happen sometimes for no good reason we fail sometimes things happen to us that we have have no control over and accepting that fact is really the first big step in breaking through perfectionism so letting life happen is all about being okay with failure and not trying to avoid it it's also about being okay with not always making progress towards a goal but instead being happy and content with no progress or even regression which does happen sometimes now this idea is similar to the concept of Wabi Sai which is

a Japanese philosophy with Origins and Buddhism wabisabi is all about accepting the beauty and imperfection and surrendering to the constant and flows of life and the philosophy encourages us to seek out a simple life appreciate nature around us accept the challenges we're faced with and try as best as we can to live in the moment now if you think about it there are many connections today between psychology and the teachings of Buddhism and we can trace a lot of this back to the work of Karen horny who was a psychoanalyst in the first half of

the 1900s and she sought out the study of Buddhist principles in her late life interestingly she also coins the phrase the tyranny of the shs so when we say things like I should go to the gym today or I should make more progress on that work task or I should spend a little bit longer on that thing we automatically create a divide with our imperfect real self on one hand and then this idealized perfect self on the other and the thing that bridges that Gap is this idea of should I should be more like this

other person and so as a very useful tangible action point whenever you find yourself using the word should try and change that word in your own mind for me personally I always try and replace the word should with the word want to or feel like or could choose to so instead of I should go to the gym today I could choose to go to the gym today or I really want to go to the gym today and there is something nice about replacing that should that removes that sense of coercion and removes this like contrast

between our current self and our perfect self tip number three to overcome perfectionism is to try and reframe failure as success always remember that whatever you do failure is not humiliating it's humanizing it's normal and natural to fail in fact we will fail way more than we will succeed you have one success it's followed by infinite amounts of failure now one way to think about this is that kind of this idea of dealing with failure is something that you level up at over time like most of us start at level one where we view failure

as being a really bad thing failure is really bad then at some point in our life we graduate to level two which is this idea that huh failing is actually normal it is normal to fail then at some point we graduate to number three which is hey failure is a learning process I learn something from the thing and at some point we might graduate to level four which is just viewing failure as a success like it's absolutely fantastic that I failed because now I've got more data I've learned some things you know a bad day

for the ego is a good day for the soul all of that kind of fun stuff and so a question to ask yourself is where are you currently on this level 1 to four spectrum of how you think about failure and what would it take to get to the next level tip number four for beating perfectionism is to step outside of your comfort zone fairly regularly those are really important things to take away because those things that you can learn that help you develop that help you become more confident and and importantly help you break

through your perfectionism is by taking those small steps out of your comfort zone now if we think back to Harry and Percy Percy the perfectionist displayed an aversion to failure and criticism but if we really want to overcome perfectionism then we should definitely challenge these thoughts by putting ourselves in situation where there is a high risk of failure and that means stepping outside of our comfort zone for example when I realized that I wasn't particularly charismatic and wanted to improve my Charisma levels I realized that I'd be stepping outside of my comfort zone by forcing

myself to put my hand up in every single classroom session or every lecture medical school and to ask some sort of question and that was good because initially it was really scary but it helped me get outside of my comfort zone and made me realize huh it's not so bad no one actually cares starting this YouTube channel in 2017 you know it's kind of weird walking around University with a big big ass camera filming people my name is Ali medical student you should look me up and now you know vlogging in public is still kind

of scary but I've been doing this for like 7 years now so I it's definitely squarely within my comfort zone now this might go without saying but stepping outside our comfort zone is inherently uncomfortable it might not feel good even though book is called feel good productivity it's not that every single moment of your life has to feel good and has to feel comfortable sometimes stepping outside of our comfort zone and embracing that discomfort drives feeling good in the long term one exercise I find really helpful here is Tim Ferris fear setting exercise which is

part of the journaling Hub that we've talked about so you can check that down below if you feel like it and then tip number five for overcoming perfectionism is to sketch out your goals if you're especially perfectionistic having rigid firm and and what are often lofty goals is going to be really problematic because you may not meet them and you may not meet them for you know no good reason and I like to think of this as having like vague sketchy goals rather than very specific goals and there is some evidence about this that I

do actually talk about in my book where basically researchers have tested this difference between specific goals and more vague goals in the context of trying to encourage people to do exercise and they have people set different goals before they walk for 6 minutes now some of the people set smart goals which are specific measurable achievable realistic and time bound and you would think that their performance would be best but the distance that they walked was no different to those who set what we call open goals now open goals are those that are designed to be

non-specific open-ended and exploratory so saying something like I'll see how far I can walk in 6 minutes instead of I need to walk 600 m in 6 minutes now interestingly open goals could even be better than smart goals in some cases because in this study these goals meant people increased their perceived performance and this can ultimately make you feel more optimistic and more confident and in fact those who said the open goals were more keen to repeat the walking test compared to those who set smart goals now the way I like to use this information

is that you know smart goals are still very useful but if you're a beginner at something if you're new to it or if you're struggling with perfectionism actually making your goal less smart making it less specific less ambitious and more vague often that is the thing that will help you beat the perfectionism and get started with the thing and then yes of course if you're trying to improve your standards and get better over time smart goals are super helpful but if not then I like to use something called nice goals n IC goals which I

talk about in chapter 4 I think of my book nice stands for NE term input based controllable and energizing so what can I do in the next week NE term what's an input that I can control so how many steps I walk is an input I can control whereas like my position in the race is an output that's outside of my control because it depends on other people so NE term input based controllable and energizing how can I make the process energizing and enjoyable so hopefully there was at least something that you took away from

this video to help combat perfectionism and if you're interested in the whole interview I did with Thomas Curran who's an expert in the topic you can check that out on my podcast right over here thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time bye-bye