What is perfectionism?
Perfectionism is a process that can have both helpful and unhelpful impacts on a person’s life. Perfectionism has become increasingly common in recent decades and seems to have flourished in a hyper-connected world where people can control and curate the image they present to the world.
Helpful perfectionism could also be described as healthy striving—the pursuit of excellence accompanied by a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. People with helpful perfectionism set goals that can be adjusted when they are no longer useful or become unattainable. In helpful perfectionism, these efforts move the person towards their values, and this can be associated with positive mental health outcomes.
By contrast, in unhelpful perfectionism, the focus becomes striving to get away from feared outcomes such as failure or mediocrity (Kemp, 2021). There is an obsessive quality to unhelpful perfectionism where the standards the person is striving to achieve are rigid and inflexible. They are also often raised if they are ever achieved, creating a sense of never being good enough. A core feature of unhelpful perfectionism is relentless self-criticism when failures, or perceived failures, occur. Perfectionistic patterns develop to avoid failure and painful self-criticism, including avoidance, procrastination and repeated checking.
The five key processes of unhelpful perfectionism are:
- Extremely high and rigid standards that tend to increase over time
- Intense fear of failure
- Relentless self-criticism
- Persistent attempts to avoid failure and self-criticism
- Long-term negative consequences resulting from these avoidance behaviours
Unhelpful perfectionism is a transdiagnostic process that can contribute to the development, persistence, and severity of a wide range of mental health problems and even interfere with the effectiveness of therapy (Egan et al., 2022; Egan et al., 2011). Mental health problems that can include perfectionistic patterns include anxiety disorders, depression, eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and burnout. Addressing perfectionism as a process on its own, even without directly addressing the overarching mental health problem, has the potential to relieve a person’s suffering and improve their quality of life.
For more information on perfectionism, including an e-book on unhelpful perfectionism in helping professionals, check out the other resources on this site.
References:
Egan, S. J., Wade, T. D., Fitzallen, G., O’Brien, A., & Shafran, R. (2022). A meta-synthesis of qualitative studies of the link between anxiety, depression and perfectionism: implications for treatment. Behavioural and cognitive psychotherapy, 50(1), 89–105. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1352465821000357
Egan, S. J., Wade, T. D., & Shafran, R. (2011). Perfectionism as a transdiagnostic process: A clinical review. Clinical psychology review, 31(2), 203–212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.04.009
Kemp, J. (2021). The ACT Workbook for Perfectionism: Build Your Best (Imperfect) Life Using Powerful Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Self-Compassion Skills. New Harbinger Publications.