Perfectionism represents a command in the brain to do the impossible which is to consistently work as hard as a human being can without rest or self-care and to create a service or product that all agree has no detectible lacks, flaws or defects. What are the roots of perfectionism? They lie in how parents treat their children. Some parents who cause perfectionism have a mental illness like OCD that makes them perceive nothing is ever right enough, good enough or acceptable enough. Other parents do not have a mental illness but were trained by their parents to be perfect in areas such as school grades, sports, cleanliness or behavior and to be on the receiving end of critical rejection if they didn’t measure up. I know of a straight A college student who attempted to kill herself with pills when she got a B plus on a paper. What are the harms of perfectionism? As adults perfectionists have problems with workaholism, procrastination, chronic stress, insomnia, anxiety, excessive drinking, depression, poor cardiovascular.health, and early death from heart attacks, strokes or suicide. While they are busy editing, revising, and fussing endlessly with a work project that never seems good enough, other adults are having fun socializing, exercising, doing yoga, meditating, reading or watching fun TV shows or movies. How do you release yourself from the prison of perfectionism? Therapists typically use motivational interviewing or CBT. Either way the client is invited to consider the benefits vs. the costs of perfectionism. When you really think about it there are very few benefits since services or products that are 80 to 85% as good as they could possibly be, are generally found quite acceptable by others, often because others lack the knowledge and sophistication to understand what’s missing and are happy to pay less. The costs, however, are enormous. They include wasting time, energy, and sleep; fretting endlessly over minor flaws that no one else notices; verbal self-attacks for not doing enough or not doing things well enough.In one case a client took many hours on the weekend to deep clean her entire home while her husband and the kids played. By calculating her life span I was able to determine that when she died she would have done 4,056 deep cleanings. I asked her if that is what she wanted on her tombstone rather than something a bit more cheerful and uplifting. This switched the lightbulb on.
