Financial Review
Perfectionism is often portrayed as something to strive for, a positive trait that drives success at work, enviable physiques, tidy homes and clean fingernails. But experts say it can lead to poor mental health.
Netball star Caitlin Bassett says she was born a perfectionist. She recalls vigilantly policing her bedroom as a child so her sister could not come in and mess it up.
Bassett, a former captain of Australia’s national netball team, the Diamonds, only came to understand her perfectionism when the consequences caught up with her.
“I just thought it was a natural part of elite sport,” she says. “Winning is fantastic, but after a while you’re looking for something more. It’s hard to put into words, but you want more than just a win.”
Flinders University psychology professor Tracey Wade says although perfectionism is not a psychiatric diagnosis, it can make people more vulnerable to developing anxiety, depression or an eating disorder. It can also be decreased with interventions such as cognitive behavioural therapy, she says.
Perfectionism is also more common than is generally thought, adds Zena Burgess, the chief executive of the Australian Psychological Society. “Perfectionism is rewarded in our culture, and particularly in the workplace, in the sense that people are encouraged to believe they can be perfect,” she says. “It manifests in the workplace as excessive attention to detail, an inability to delegate, fear of failure and constant worry about when mistakes may happen.”
The dead weight of societal expectations on the human soul is hardly a new phenomenon. It was tough to be a good 1950s housewife, but social media and helicopter parenting have blown it out of the water for a new generation of business leaders, influencers and elite athletes.
It’s almost as if monumental success and over-achievement have become the norm; being ordinary just doesn’t cut the mustard.
As British psychologist and writer Moya Sarner puts it: “Deep down, I think many of us are driven by the unconscious wish that if we could just have the perfect body, the perfect kitchen, the perfect job, the perfect wardrobe, the perfect family – if we could just rid ourselves of every flaw – then we would finally be happy. For that reason, [perfectionism] can be one of the most significant obstacles to happiness we encounter in life.”
Sarner describes herself as a recovering perfectionist and says that listening to that hyper-vigilant, punctilious, fastidious, nit-picking voice inside your head, ready to launch itself at any minor transgression of what is perfect is exhausting and ultimately debilitating.
For Bassett, being the goal shooter meant it was very easy to calculate how well she had performed. She says she got to the point where anything less than 100 per cent accuracy wasn’t good enough.
“If I shot 60 goals but missed one, I’d be pissed off with my performance. I’d let myself down.”
It was a psychologist who made the connection between Bassett’s state of stress and lack of enjoyment of the game and her perfectionism. While those tendencies were apparent as a child, elite sport is very enabling for such conditions, she says. “Perfectionism is nurtured in elite sport,” she says.
The perfection trap
High-performance coach Andrew May, the “mental skills coach” for the Manly Sea Eagles rugby league team, says he often sees perfectionism in the people he works with, in particular CEOs and elite athletes.
And most only discover that their overly long hours, multiple drafts, excessive practice, obsession with detail and strained relationships are a result of their perfectionism when they end up in counselling thanks to burn-out, eating disorders, anxiety and depression. Perfectionism, he says, is the “plague of our time”.
Thomas Curran, a London School of Economics academic, and author of The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough, says that perfectionism is the pursuit of excessively high standards combined with “a deep and very profound sense of self-criticism and self-loathing”.
“It’s striving, but it’s striving with a lot of baggage, and that baggage comes in the way of insecurity and self-criticism,” he told The Australian Financial Review last year.
He and his colleague Andrew Hill have developed a theory that overly competitive labour markets, particularly for high-status professional jobs, along with unaffordable housing, are driving young people (and their parents) to go to greater lengths to gain some level of competitive advantage – a master’s degree, another unpaid internship, one more overseas study program and so on.
Curran says we can minimise our perfectionist tendencies by accepting that “we are flawed, we are imperfect, and that’s OK”.
Doing things that make us feel uncomfortable, such as taking the lead on a major report or delivering a presentation in front of a large audience, can also help by challenging the idealised image we have of ourselves.
“You’ll find that, actually, it wasn’t as bad as you thought it was going to be most of the time. And that can feel like taking a sledgehammer to perfectionism,” Curran says.
So, is perfectionism a result of nature or nurture? While there are arguments on both sides, the research literature leans towards the latter.
A 2023 article in Psychology Today said that parents who are too demanding and who have set too-high standards for their children can contribute to perfectionism because their children come to believe they will never be good enough.
A trait shaped in childhood
Constant criticism and judgment can have the same effect, while offspring of perfectionist parents attempt to replicate similar behaviours.
“Children do what they see. They are our greatest imitators. When parents place these unrealistic expectations and criticisms on themselves, children notice. They can learn to model this behaviour and develop similar tendencies of controllingness,” the Psychology Today article reported.
Perfectionism emerges in the children of authoritarian families where love is conditional – a reward for good behaviour than can be withdrawn as a punishment.
It is also particularly prevalent among people who live and work in environments where there is fierce competition or a culture of bullying – or both.
In the shadow of social media, young people are growing up unhappy with who they are and what they have – or more importantly, don’t appear to be or have.
A 2018 study of university students in the UK, US and Canada found that they reported higher levels of perfectionism than their forebears in the 1990s and early 2000.
Interestingly, the study examined three types of perfectionism: the personal desire to be perfect; the desire to live up to other’s high expectations; and the desire for others to live up to unrealistically high ideals.
In the 25 or so years from 1990, the researchers found that self-oriented perfectionism scores rose by 10 per cent, socially prescribed scores by 30 per cent and holding others to account by 16 per cent.
High-performance coach May works with his clients on finding and articulating a sense of purpose to guide their actions and understand where their energies are best utilised. But before that, they must acknowledge the enemy within.
“Perfectionism is black and white. It’s a dichotomous thinking that either it’s all perfect or terrible. A perfectionist is rigid,” May says.
When to get help
He also works with clients to find a range that is acceptable. Instead of always aiming for 100 per cent, perfectionists have to learn how live with something slightly less.
“Try being a little easier on yourself and set more realistic goals,” he says,
“If you don’t swim a PB in the pool at lunchtime today is it really going to impact your life in a major way?”
The Australian Psychological Society’s Burgess says most perfectionists live happy and fulfilled lives, but if it is starting to impede on a normal and productive existence, then it’s time to take stock and perhaps see a counsellor.
“Whether its setting realistic goals, practising self-compassion or setting time limits for tasks, there are lots of things people can do to stop their perfectionist traits from becoming harmful to their work, productivity and relationship,” says Burgess.
For Bassett, who now works as a sports journalist, it is still a struggle. Awareness has opened the door to slightly more self-forgiveness, but she still spends hours drafting and redrafting her articles before filing, terrified they might be slightly less than 100 per cent perfect.
Nine signs you’re a perfectionist
1) You can’t stop thinking about a mistake you made
2) You are intensely competitive and hate losing, even Monopoly or Scrabble
3) You have to do things “perfectly” or not at all
4) You demand perfection from other people
5) You won’t ask for help as this can be seen as a flaw or weakness
6) You will persist at a task long after other people have quit
7) You are a fault-finder and tend to correct other people when they are
wrong
8) You consider people with cluttered desks or houses as lazy and undisciplined
9) You are very self-conscious about making mistakes in front of other people